An interesting opinion article from the Toronto Star
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http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/744736
David Rothkopf, who served in the administration of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, has come up with what has to be the defining description of the character of both the year, 2010, and of the 21st century's second decade, now just underway.
His insight, quoted in The Financial Times of London, was this: "You could argue that the first decade of the 21st century was the last decade of the American century." Rothkopf then added, "We are now entering the multi-polar century."
That really is it. Rothkopf expresses the essence of what happened last year: the clear beginnings of the end of the long, unchallenged global supremacy of the United States.
It expresses also the essence of the new world order of multilateralism that began to take shape last year with the establishment of the G20, or group of 20 nations, to replace the U.S.-dominated G7 of western insiders (Canada included), and also by the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change.
As Copenhagen confirmed by its meagre accomplishments (if it achieved anything at all), multilateralism is no cure-all. It can replace too much power being exercised by one nation with global impotence.
It's worth recalling what happened the last time something like this happened: Rome's decline wasn't followed by a flowering of all the once oppressed peoples of its empire, but by the Dark Ages.
Whether for good or bad, it's all but certain that this kind of transition is now underway.
Lots of indicators exist to confirm it. Some are entirely benign.
Last year China edged ahead of Japan to become the world's second-largest economy.
According to the latest estimates, it will pull ahead of the U.S. in little more than a decade-and-a-half, or by 2027.
Other indicators are malign. Iran, a medium-sized nation with a second-rate economy, has been able to successfully defy the U.S. (and the United Nations) as it proceeds with its program to develop a nuclear bomb entirely undeterred by threats of international trade and diplomatic sanctions.
As revealing an indicator is that ordinary Americans seem to feel in their bones that this kind of transformation is inevitable. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, for the first time since World War II a plurality of Americans (49 per cent) believe the U.S. should "mind its own business and let other countries get along the best they can."
Related Pew findings show only half (24 per cent) of Americans today show interest in international human rights compared to 43 per cent in 2002. And there's been a near collapse (from 44 per cent to 10 per cent) of their interest in spreading democracy around the world. This kind of defensive inward turning isn't uniquely American. A good case can be made that Canada is entering a post-Pearsonian era – that we have grown weary with, or indifferent to, the kind of high-minded, activist foreign policy that defined Canada through the decades following external affairs minister Lester Pearson's winning of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for inventing international peacekeeping.
No surveys exist yet to support this judgment. It is striking, though, that so little public criticism has been directed at Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the kind of role – negative and concerned only with Canadian self-interest – he played at the Copenhagen conference.
The new, inward-turned attitude is, in fact, general throughout the West. In 2009, the European Union at last got itself a new constitution. To fulfill the important new post of president of Europe, the EU's 27 member states chose former Belgium Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, best known for being utterly unknown.
There is one sound reason for this inwardness: the world is getting old. In Europe itself, one in three is now older than 65. The aging curve is even steeper in Japan and also in China .
The U.S. is actually comparatively young, as is Canada – in both instances because of heavy immigration. Here, incidentally, Canada received in 2009 one of the most resounding votes of confidence that has ever come our way.
A Gallup survey has found that around the world some 700 million people would like to live in a country other than their own. Of these, the largest number, 165 million, said they would like to move to the U.S. This was predictable.
Amazing, though, was Gallup's finding that 45 million want to become Canadians.
The numbers mean the U.S. population would increase by roughly a third while Canada's population would more than double. Given that the U.S. population is 10 times larger than Canada's, that makes us proportionately more attractive to close to three times as many people.
That's another measure of America's comparative decline. This is, it should be emphasized, strictly a comparative decline. Militarily, the U.S. is as unchallengeable as ever – if not so in the slums of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Its universities still dominate the international rankings, it is still the workshop of global popular culture and it is still the technological leader (although keep an eye on China's new $220 billion program to develop green energy technology).
And, in Barack Obama, the U.S. has the world's most attractive leader and, by a wide margin, its most eloquent one. Obama, though, may have the bad luck of being the right man at the wrong time.
The riskiest decision Obama took in 2009 – to escalate the war in Afghanistan – was almost certainly prompted in some part by a need to show the U.S. was not in decline.
Managing decline is the hardest of all political tasks. By definition, it produces few, if any, victories or epiphanies. The accusation of being weak, already being made in Washington, can be deadly.
Abundant reasons exist to wish Obama well. One additional one appeared in 2009: a worse start than Copenhagen to Rothkopf's "multi-polar century" cannot be imagined.
This, and inward turning, will leave us without anyone to talk to except ourselves.
Richard Gwyn's column appears every other Friday. gwynr@sympatico.ca
_________________________________________________________________
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/744736
David Rothkopf, who served in the administration of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, has come up with what has to be the defining description of the character of both the year, 2010, and of the 21st century's second decade, now just underway.
His insight, quoted in The Financial Times of London, was this: "You could argue that the first decade of the 21st century was the last decade of the American century." Rothkopf then added, "We are now entering the multi-polar century."
That really is it. Rothkopf expresses the essence of what happened last year: the clear beginnings of the end of the long, unchallenged global supremacy of the United States.
It expresses also the essence of the new world order of multilateralism that began to take shape last year with the establishment of the G20, or group of 20 nations, to replace the U.S.-dominated G7 of western insiders (Canada included), and also by the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change.
As Copenhagen confirmed by its meagre accomplishments (if it achieved anything at all), multilateralism is no cure-all. It can replace too much power being exercised by one nation with global impotence.
It's worth recalling what happened the last time something like this happened: Rome's decline wasn't followed by a flowering of all the once oppressed peoples of its empire, but by the Dark Ages.
Whether for good or bad, it's all but certain that this kind of transition is now underway.
Lots of indicators exist to confirm it. Some are entirely benign.
Last year China edged ahead of Japan to become the world's second-largest economy.
According to the latest estimates, it will pull ahead of the U.S. in little more than a decade-and-a-half, or by 2027.
Other indicators are malign. Iran, a medium-sized nation with a second-rate economy, has been able to successfully defy the U.S. (and the United Nations) as it proceeds with its program to develop a nuclear bomb entirely undeterred by threats of international trade and diplomatic sanctions.
As revealing an indicator is that ordinary Americans seem to feel in their bones that this kind of transformation is inevitable. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, for the first time since World War II a plurality of Americans (49 per cent) believe the U.S. should "mind its own business and let other countries get along the best they can."
Related Pew findings show only half (24 per cent) of Americans today show interest in international human rights compared to 43 per cent in 2002. And there's been a near collapse (from 44 per cent to 10 per cent) of their interest in spreading democracy around the world. This kind of defensive inward turning isn't uniquely American. A good case can be made that Canada is entering a post-Pearsonian era – that we have grown weary with, or indifferent to, the kind of high-minded, activist foreign policy that defined Canada through the decades following external affairs minister Lester Pearson's winning of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for inventing international peacekeeping.
No surveys exist yet to support this judgment. It is striking, though, that so little public criticism has been directed at Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the kind of role – negative and concerned only with Canadian self-interest – he played at the Copenhagen conference.
The new, inward-turned attitude is, in fact, general throughout the West. In 2009, the European Union at last got itself a new constitution. To fulfill the important new post of president of Europe, the EU's 27 member states chose former Belgium Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy, best known for being utterly unknown.
There is one sound reason for this inwardness: the world is getting old. In Europe itself, one in three is now older than 65. The aging curve is even steeper in Japan and also in China .
The U.S. is actually comparatively young, as is Canada – in both instances because of heavy immigration. Here, incidentally, Canada received in 2009 one of the most resounding votes of confidence that has ever come our way.
A Gallup survey has found that around the world some 700 million people would like to live in a country other than their own. Of these, the largest number, 165 million, said they would like to move to the U.S. This was predictable.
Amazing, though, was Gallup's finding that 45 million want to become Canadians.
The numbers mean the U.S. population would increase by roughly a third while Canada's population would more than double. Given that the U.S. population is 10 times larger than Canada's, that makes us proportionately more attractive to close to three times as many people.
That's another measure of America's comparative decline. This is, it should be emphasized, strictly a comparative decline. Militarily, the U.S. is as unchallengeable as ever – if not so in the slums of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Its universities still dominate the international rankings, it is still the workshop of global popular culture and it is still the technological leader (although keep an eye on China's new $220 billion program to develop green energy technology).
And, in Barack Obama, the U.S. has the world's most attractive leader and, by a wide margin, its most eloquent one. Obama, though, may have the bad luck of being the right man at the wrong time.
The riskiest decision Obama took in 2009 – to escalate the war in Afghanistan – was almost certainly prompted in some part by a need to show the U.S. was not in decline.
Managing decline is the hardest of all political tasks. By definition, it produces few, if any, victories or epiphanies. The accusation of being weak, already being made in Washington, can be deadly.
Abundant reasons exist to wish Obama well. One additional one appeared in 2009: a worse start than Copenhagen to Rothkopf's "multi-polar century" cannot be imagined.
This, and inward turning, will leave us without anyone to talk to except ourselves.
Richard Gwyn's column appears every other Friday. gwynr@sympatico.ca
