The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (8 page)

Economics is not a zero-sum game—the rise of other players expands the pie, which is good for all—but geopolitics is a struggle for influence and control. As other countries become more active, America’s enormous space for action will inevitably diminish. Can the United States accommodate itself to the rise of other powers, of various political stripes, on several continents? This does not mean becoming resigned to chaos or aggression; far from it. But the only way for the United States to deter rogue actions will be to create a broad, durable coalition against them. And that will be possible only if Washington can show that it is willing to allow other countries to become stakeholders in the new order. In today’s international order, progress means compromise. No country will get its way entirely. These are easy words to write or say but difficult to implement. They mean accepting the growth in power and influence of other countries, the prominence of interests and concerns. This balance—between accommodation and deterrence—is the chief challenge for American foreign policy in the next few decades.

Another Kind of Bubble

I began this chapter by arguing that the new order did not herald American decline, because I believe that America has enormous strengths and that the new world will not throw up a new superpower but rather a diversity of forces that Washington can navigate and even help direct. But still, as the rest of the world rises, in purely economic terms, America will experience relative decline. As others grow faster, its share of the pie will be smaller (though the shift will likely be small for many years). In addition, the new nongovernmental forces that are increasingly active will constrain Washington substantially.

This is a challenge for Washington but also for everyone else. For almost three centuries, the world has been undergirded by the presence of a large liberal hegemon—first Britain, then the United States. These two superpowers helped create and maintain an open world economy, protecting trade routes and sea lanes, acting as lenders of last resort, holding the reserve currency, investing abroad, and keeping their own markets open. They also tipped the military balance against the great aggressors of their ages, from Napoleon’s France, to Germany, to the Soviet Union. For all its abuses of power, the United States has been the creator and sustainer of the current order of open trade and democratic government—an order that has been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of humankind. As things change, and as America’s role changes, that order could begin to fracture. The collapse of the dollar—to the point where there was no global reserve currency—would be a problem for the world just as much as for America. And solving common problems in an era of diffusion and decentralization could turn out to be far more difficult without a superpower.

Some Americans have become acutely conscious of the changing world. Business leaders are increasingly aware of the shifts taking place around the world and responding to them rapidly and unsentimentally. Large U.S.-based multi-nationals almost uniformly report that their growth now relies on penetrating new foreign markets. With annual revenue growth of 2–3 percent a year in the United States and 10–15 percent a year abroad, they know they have to adapt to a post-American world—or else lose out in it. The companies on the S&P 500 generate 46 percent of their profits outside the United States, and for many of the biggest American names, the proportion is much higher. You might think of Coca-Cola as the quintessentially American company. In fact, it is a vast global enterprise, operating in 206 countries. “We have a factory in Ramallah that employs 2,000 people. We have a factory in Afghanistan. We have factories everywhere,” explains Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coke. Nearly 80 percent of Coca-Cola’s revenue comes from outside the United States, and an even greater percentage of its employees are in foreign countries. “We are a global company that happens to be headquartered in Atlanta,” says Kent.

A similar awareness is visible in America’s universities, where more and more students study and travel abroad and interact with foreign students. Younger Americans live comfortably with the knowledge that the latest trends—in finance, architecture, art, technology—might originate in London, Shanghai, Seoul, Tallinn, or Mumbai.

But this outward orientation is not yet common in American society more broadly. The American economy remains internally focused, though this is changing, with trade making up about a quarter of GDP (compared with 44 percent for Germany). Insularity has been one of nature’s blessings to America, bordered as it is by two vast oceans and two benign neighbors. America has not been sullied by the machinations and weariness of the Old World and has always been able to imagine a new and different order—whether in Germany, Japan, or even Iraq. But at the same time, this isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyond their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. The result is that they are increasingly suspicious of this emerging global era. There is a growing gap between America’s worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand, and the majority of the American people, on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America’s competitive edge and its political future.

Popular suspicions are fed and encouraged by an irresponsible national political culture. During the Bush administration, it was easy enough to criticize Washington for its arrogance and unilateralism, which handicapped America abroad. But the problem was not confined to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or the Republicans, and did not end even after their particular brand of chest-thumping machismo left the White House. Listen to some Democrats in Washington, and you hear a weaker unilateralism—on trade, labor standards, and various pet human rights issues. On terrorism, both parties continue to speak in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else. American politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, sanction, and condemn whole countries for myriad failings. Over the last fifteen years, the United States has placed sanctions on half the world’s population. We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C., has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.

The 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed a remarkable increase worldwide in positive views about free trade, markets, and democracy. Large majorities in countries from China and Germany to Bangladesh and Nigeria said that growing trade ties between countries were good. Of the forty-seven countries polled, however, the one that came in dead last in terms of support for free trade was the United States. In the seven years the survey has been done, no country has seen as great a drop-off as the United States.

Or take a look at the attitudes toward foreign companies. When asked whether they had a positive impact, a surprisingly large number of people in countries like Brazil, Nigeria, India, and Bangladesh said yes. Those countries have typically been suspicious of Western multinationals. (South Asia’s unease has some basis; after all, it was initially colonized by a multinational corporation, the British East India Company.) And yet, 73 percent in India, 75 percent in Bangladesh, 70 percent in Brazil, and 82 percent in Nigeria now have positive views of these companies. The figure for America, in contrast, is 45 percent, which places us in the bottom five. We want the world to accept American companies with open arms, but when they come here—that’s a different matter. Attitudes on immigration represent an even larger reversal. On an issue where the United States has been the model for the world, the country has regressed toward an angry defensive crouch. Where we once wanted to pioneer every new technology, we now look at innovation fearfully, wondering how it will change things.

The irony is that the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions. For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism. But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated—free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission—it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

3

A Non-Western World?

I
n 1492, as everybody knows, Christopher Columbus set sail on one of the most ambitious expeditions in human history. What is less well known is that eighty-seven years earlier a Chinese admiral named Zheng He began the first of seven equally ambitious expeditions. Zheng’s ships were much bigger and better constructed than those of Columbus, or Vasco da Gama, or any of Europe’s other great fifteenth- and sixteenth-century seafarers. On his first trip, in 1405, he took 317 vessels and 28,000 men, compared with Columbus’ 4 boats and 150 sailors. The largest vessels in the Chinese fleet, the “treasure ships,” were over four hundred feet—more than four times the length of Columbus’ flagship,
Santa Maria
—and had nine masts. Each required so much wood that three hundred acres of forest were felled to build a single one. There were ships designed to carry horses, supplies, food, water, and, of course, troops. The smallest vessel in Zheng’s flotilla, a highly maneuverable five-masted warship, was still twice as large as the legendary Spanish galleon.

The Chinese ships were constructed with special woods, intricate joints, sophisticated waterproofing techniques, and an adjustable centerboard keel. The treasure ships had large, luxurious cabins, silk sails, and windowed halls. All were constructed on dry docks in Nanjing, the world’s largest and most advanced shipbuilding port. In the three years after 1405, 1,681 ships were built or refitted at Nanjing. Nothing remotely comparable could have happened in Europe at the time.
¹

Size mattered. These massive fleets were meant to “shock and awe” the inhabitants of the surrounding area, making clear the power and reach of the Ming dynasty. On his seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, Zheng traveled widely through the waters of the Indian Ocean and around Southeast Asia. He gave gifts to the natives and accepted tributes. When encountering opposition, he did not hesitate to use military might. On one voyage, he brought back a captured Sumatran pirate; on another, a rebellious chief from Ceylon. He returned from all of them with flowers, fruits, precious stones, and exotic animals, including giraffes and zebras for the imperial zoo.

But Zheng’s story ends oddly. By the 1430s, a new emperor had come to power. He abruptly ended the imperial expeditions and turned his back on trade and exploration. Some officials tried to keep the tradition going, but to no avail. In 1500, the court decreed that anyone who built a ship with more than two masts (the size required to go any distance at sea) would be executed. In 1525, coastal authorities were ordered to destroy any oceangoing vessels they encountered and throw the owners in prison. In 1551, it became a crime to go to sea on a multimast ship for any purpose. When the Qing dynasty came to power in 1644, it continued this basic policy, but it had less faith in decrees: instead, it simply scorched a 700-mile-long strip of China’s southern coast, rendering it uninhabitable. These measures had the desired effect: China’s shipping industry collapsed. In the decades after Zheng’s last voyage, dozens of Western explorers traveled to the waters around India and China. But it took three hundred years for a Chinese vessel to make its way to Europe—on a visit to London for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

What explains this remarkable turnaround? The Chinese elite was divided over the country’s outward approach, and Beijing’s new rulers considered the naval expeditions failures. They were extremely expensive, forced higher taxes on an already strained population, and provided very little return. Trade had flourished as a result of some of these contacts, but most of it had benefited only traders and pirates. In addition, by the mid-fifteenth century, Mongols and other raiders were threatening the empire’s frontiers, demanding attention and consuming resources. Seafaring seemed like a costly distraction.

It was a fateful decision. Just as China chose to turn away from the outside world, Europe was venturing abroad, and it was Europe’s naval expeditions that allowed it to energize itself and spread its power and influence across the globe. If China had kept its navy afloat, would the course of modern history have been different? Probably not. China’s decision to turn inward was not simply one bad strategic call. It was an expression of a civilization’s stagnation. Behind the decision to end the expeditions lay the whole complex of reasons why China
*
and most of the non-Western world lagged behind the Western world for so many centuries. And lag they did. For hundreds of years after the fifteenth century, while Europe and the United States industrialized, urbanized, and modernized, the rest of the world remained poor and agricultural.

If we are to understand what the “rise of the rest” means, we must understand just how long the rest has been dormant. It turns out that the intellectual and material dominance of the West is neither a recent nor an ephemeral phenomenon. We have lived in a Western world for over half a millennium. Despite the rise of other nations and continents, the shadows of the West will be long and its legacies deep for decades to come, perhaps longer.

It has become commonplace to say that actually China and India were as rich as the West right up until the 1800s. The dominance of the West, according to this perspective, has been a 200-year blip, and we are now returning to a more normal balance. This statement also implies that the West’s advantages may be largely accidental—the result of “coal and colonies,”
²
that is, the discovery of a cheap energy source and the domination of the rich lands of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This view, which embraces a multicultural sensibility that denies any special status to the West, has its political advantages. But while it may be politically correct, it is historically incorrect.

One reason for this misinterpretation is that analysts often focus solely on the total size of the Chinese and Indian economies. Historically, this has been a misleading statistic. Until the modern age, a country’s economy could not be mobilized, extracted, or put to use in any meaningful sense. The fact that in, say, the seventeenth century, millions of peasants in remote and unconnected corners of China were working the land in grinding poverty did not really contribute to the nation’s usable wealth or power, even though their output added up to a large number. Population was the main ingredient of GDP, and production was largely agricultural. Since China and India had four times the population of Western Europe in 1600, their GDP was, of course, larger. Even in 1913, when Britain was the world’s leading power, with cutting-edge technology and industrial production and trade many times larger than all of Asia’s, China could claim a greater total GDP.

In studying the preindustrial age, before big government, communications, transport, and broad-based taxation, aggregate GDP alone tells us little about national power or a country’s level of advancement. It doesn’t say anything about the dynamism of the society or its ability to make new discoveries and inventions. And it was mastery in these areas that gave a country new ways to create wealth and its government power.

We get a much clearer picture of the real standing of countries if we consider
economic growth
and
GDP per capita
. Western European GDP per capita was higher than that of both China and India by 1500; by 1600, it was 50 percent higher than China’s. From there, the gap kept growing. Between 1350 and 1950—
six hundred years
—GDP per capita remained roughly constant in China and India (hovering around $600 for China and $550 for India). In the same period, Western European GDP per capita went from $662 to $4,594, a
594 percent increase
.
*

European travelers in the seventeenth century routinely pointed out that Chinese and Indian living conditions were well below those in northwestern Europe. The economist Gregory Clark calculates that in the eighteenth century the average daily wage of a laborer in Amsterdam could buy him 21 pounds of wheat, in London 16 pounds, and in Paris 10. In China, a day’s wages would buy about 6.6 pounds of wheat (or its equivalent). Clark has also examined records to determine differences in the number of famines, which points in the same direction. The West, in short, was more prosperous than the East long before the eighteenth century.

Still, it was not always thus. For the first centuries of the second millennium, the East was ahead of the West by almost every measure. As Europe foundered in the depths of the Middle Ages, both the Middle East and Asia prospered, with lively traditions of scholarship, invention, and trade. The Middle East was at the forefront of civilization, preserving and building on Greek and Roman knowledge and producing pathbreaking work in fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, medicine, anthropology, and psychology. Arabic numerals, of course, were invented there, as was the concept of zero. The word “algebra” comes from the title of a book,
Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah
, by an Arab scholar. The word “algorithm” derives from the scholar’s name, al-Khwarizmi. Militarily, the Ottomans were the envy of their rivals and continued to expand their empire, battling Western states in Central Asia and Europe until the seventeenth century. India, during its most vibrant eras, boasted scientific prowess, artistic genius, and architectural splendor. Even in the early sixteenth century, under Krishnadevaraya, the southern Indian city of Vijayanagar was described by many foreign visitors as one of the great cities of the world, comparable to Rome. A few centuries earlier, China was probably richer and more technologically sophisticated than any other country, using various technologies—gunpowder, movable type, the stirrup—that the West would stumble upon only centuries later. Even Africa had a higher average income than Europe during this period.

The tide began to turn in the fifteenth century—and by the sixteenth century, Europe had moved ahead. With the revolution in thought that is termed the Renaissance, men like Copernicus, Vesalius, and Galileo gave birth to modern science. Indeed, the hundred years between 1450 and 1550 marked the most significant break in human history—between faith, ritual, and dogma, on the one hand, and observation, experimentation, and critical thought, on the other. And it happened in Europe, pushing that civilization forward for centuries. By 1593, when an English ship equipped with eighty-seven guns traveled 3,700 miles to arrive in Istanbul, an Ottoman historian would call it “a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”
³
By the seventeenth century, almost every kind of technology, product, and complex organization (like a corporation or an army) was more advanced in Western Europe than anywhere else in the world.

To believe that Asian societies were, in any material sense, on par with the West in 1700 or 1800 is to believe that the scientific and technological advances that revolutionized the Western world over the preceding three hundred years had no effect on its material condition, which is absurd.
*
Scientific advances were not merely about creating new machines. They reshaped the mental outlook of Western societies. Take the mechanical clock, which was invented in Europe in the thirteenth century. The historian Daniel Boorstin calls it “the mother of machines.” “The clock,” he notes, “broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics to the making of machines.”
⁴
Its broader effects were even more revolutionary. The clock freed man from dependence on the sun and moon. It made it possible to order the day, define the night, organize work, and—perhaps most important—measure the cost of labor, by tracking the number of hours that went into a project. Before the clock, time had no measurable value.

By the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese brought them to China, Europe’s mechanical clocks were much more sophisticated than the clumsy water clocks made in Beijing. The Chinese, however, saw little value in these machines, viewing them as toys, and they never bothered to learn how to run them. Having acquired some, they needed Europeans to stay behind to work their inventions. Similarly, when the Portuguese brought cannons to Beijing a hundred years later, they had to supply operators for the machines. China could consume modern technology, but it could not produce it. And by the eighteenth century, Beijing no longer even wanted to see foreign gadgets. In a famous letter to George III, the Qienlong emperor, who ruled from 1736 to 1795, rejected Britain’s request for trade, explaining, “We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.” The Chinese had closed their minds to the world.
⁵

Without new technologies and techniques, Asia fell prey to the classic Malthusian problem. Thomas Malthus’ famous 1798 treatise,
An Essay on the Principle of Population
, is remembered today for its erroneous pessimism, but, in fact, many of Malthus’ insights were highly intelligent. He observed that food production in England rose at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4, . . .) but population grew at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . .). This mismatch, unless altered, would ensure that the country would be hungry and impoverished, and that only catastrophes like famine and disease could raise living standards (by shrinking the population).
*
Malthus’ dilemma was quite real, but he failed to appreciate the power of technology. He did not recognize that these very pressures would generate a human response in Europe—the agricultural revolution, which vastly expanded the production of food. (The continent also eased population pressures by exporting tens of millions of people to various colonies, mostly in the Americas.) So Malthus was wrong about Europe. His analysis, however, well described Asia and Africa.