Thursday, May 08, 2008

More Good News

It's a good time to be alive.

In Newsweek International, Fareeed Zakaria also talks about the emerging multipolar world:

"In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a
year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades,
lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once
unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been
unambiguously upward.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But
along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the
distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms
of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a
landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one
defined and directed from many places and by many peoples."

He calls this the "Rise of the Rest" and the "Post-American World", but that's perhaps just an attention-getting term. After all, it's not really post-American; it's just a world in which America isn't really in charge, which is unambiguously a good thing for the United States. An age of peace and prosperity, without having to play cop of the world, will benefit the US in ways that are obvious. Perhaps not obvious to politicians who run on "protecting" us all from the evildoers, but it will be good for the rest of us.

Later, I will explain why the political and military world is also shifting for the good.

3 comments:

Holly said...

It took me a while to get there (in fact, I came across it in another blog I frequent) but that's a really excellent article.

Anonymous said...

Ian Buruma wrote an excellent article in which he reviews various books that speculate on the end of American dominance.

Rufus said...

Yeah I think it's an interesting thesis anyway. And that Burama article really is good. Thanks.