The Post-American Century

Don Mikulecky is a complexity scientist. A what? Here's his informal definition:

As a complexity scientist, I see all kinds of intricate interconnections and causal entailments.  (If "causal entailment" is too technical a term try "reason why things happen")  So along comes 2000, and the country falls into an abyss of great depth.  Forget "how did it happen" because it will take eons to work out a story for that.  More risky, but more interesting, from my perspective, is the question "why did it happen".  (Answers to "why?" lead to the identification of causal entailment.)

He applies his skills to analysis of Harold Meyerson's piece in the Washington Post which is interesting reading all on its own.

Don answers his why question this way:

So here is my answer. The reason it happened is so we would get to the point Meyerson is so aptly describing in his article. One superpower, no matter who it is, is not going to stay in the catbird seat for long. That is too far from any balance of all the complex forces acting to move the system toward some form of stability. It is basically an unstable state.  Now, let's see what Meyerson says about it all:

These events did not occur in a vacuum. Just a few weeks previous, global trade talks collapsed because China and India believed the proposed regulations would imperil their farmers. When these Doha Round deliberations began in 2001, it was inconceivable that they would be derailed by non-Western powers. By the summer of 2008, however, China and India had attained so much economic clout that they were perfectly capable of bringing the negotiations to a halt.

Notice anything about that scenario?  like the absence of the dominance of Western powers in the discussion?

It's a thoughtful discussion and one that leads into the premise of Fareed Zakaria's book, The Post-American World, which I recommend on its own as essential and very interesting reading. Fareed opens his book, "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." But the story of the rise of the rest isn't necessarily the story of the US's decline. Zakaria notes that the US's economic leadership and military superiority isn't just going to disappear. As John Ikenberry's reviewin CFR puts it, "Washington's best strategy, he argues, is to accommodate, rather than resist, these modernizing states, allowing them to become "stakeholders in the new order" in exchange for their strategic cooperation."

I wish Meyerson had followed through in his post as Zakaria did in his book though perhaps, he would need a book to accommodate the length.

Fareed published a lengthy essay based on the book in CFR's Foreign Affairs journal which he summarizes this way:

Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

Also of interest: Zakaria's Newsweek article on 'Obama Abroad'. He delineates Obama's stance from a foreign policy perspective and dismisses all the comments of puffery, and smoke and mirrors.