Newsweek: Pax Americana
Published by Al Adomite on May 5th, 2008
By Al
If you haven’t yet read Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek article “The Rise of the Rest,” it’s worth much more than the 15 minutes of your time you’ll spend reading it. He intelligently dabbles in a host of interesting issues, including global violence, new nationalism, third world industrialism, increasing world prosperity, and American pessimism.
I might write a series of posts over the next week highlighting several passages of the article. But, I thought a comment written by “Salty Dog” in response to the article best summed up the first question I wanted to pose:
I think the comments posted here demonstrate beautifully America’s Achilles heel: our obscenely overdeveloped national ego. We should be able to benefit greatly from the emergence of the rest of the countries of the globe, but we won’t. We value supremacy far more that prosperity, and as a result we will isolate ourselves in order to maintain our illusion of superiority.
Zakaria points out that 81 percent of American’s feel our nation is on the “wrong track,” despite the unprecedented levels peace, prosperity, and opportunity that our nation - and the world - has seen in the era that some call Pax Americana.
I often try to remind myself that the world poverty level is described at an income level of $1 a day. That should be a humbling thought for every American, regardless of age, race, or geography. But even these global dynamics are changing.
The share of people living on $1 a day has plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004 and is estimated to drop to 12 percent by 2015. Poverty is falling in countries that house 80 percent of the world’s population.
Statistical data suggests American free market principles are rapidly changing the “rest” of the world. Yet, our presidential primaries have, so far, shown out-dated platforms and arguments that are all still circa-1993 (the year I graduated high school, if your counting). Maybe Zakaria, and the commenter I cited above, have hit on something about our current political system.
American society can adapt to this new world. But can the American government? Washington has gotten used to a world in which all roads led to its doorstep. America has rarely had to worry about benchmarking to the rest of the world—it was always so far ahead. But the natives have gotten good at capitalism and the gap is narrowing.
Is either political party - or the trio of candidates - really ready to lead America into a newly competitive global marketplace? Or are we leaning towards a new American brand of nationalism that melds the Democrat Party’s economic nationalism with the Republican Party’s cultural nationalism?
Filed under National Issues, Uncategorized
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