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From hyperpower to new world disorder
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t
alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s?
A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone
and the U.S.
By David Olive
Feature Writer
01/01/08 "Toronto
Star " -- -- "We seek your leadership. But if
for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the
rest of us. Please get out of our way."
Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit
on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that
tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations
present.
It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no
longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five
superpowers that will define the world for at least the next
half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united
Europe.
The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese
products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America
comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great
capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their
greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local
currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit
crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime
mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading
financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of
Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned
investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the
greenback.
That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some
time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was
news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S.
economic "stagflation" that inflated the German and Swiss
currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo
parking spots fetched $90,000.
This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on
merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to
block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan
made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur.
Russia wouldn't abide Washington's sanctions on Iran. India
insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms
program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S.
ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New
Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree,
decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16
years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had
slipped, and America's destiny is now shaped by a new world
disorder of five superpowers.
All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but
one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively,
the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of
the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and
those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial
legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering
influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose
experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived,
cannot match.
The resentment of what the French labelled "the U.S.
hyper-power" in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans
were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India
were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic
command economies. And by the early years of this decade,
Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was
manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a
decisive Vladimir Putin.
The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to
unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic
prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role
on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here's Tony Blair,
who revered Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. more
than most of his predecessors. "A single-power world is
inherently unstable," Blair said back in 2005. "That's the
rationale for Europe to unite.
"We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about
the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When
we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a
superpower and a partner with the U.S."
The euro has been the world's strongest currency since 2005. But
not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People's Bank
of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar –
the world's undisputed reserve currency since the end of World
War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48
(U.S.)
It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S.
occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan,
China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the
U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America's deficient
military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big
stick behind diplomatic threats.
America now is the world's largest borrower, and China the
biggest creditor nation.
As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it's difficult to
have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued
currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when
that country is also your biggest banker.
World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and
Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon
with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular
Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to
salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman's cast of feckless
leaders in The March of Folly.
But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected
Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new
Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing
a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush
trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the
occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that
Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle
against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as
America's staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly
repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for
five years.
As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to
Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to
tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to
control. After his first encounter with the Russian president,
Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's heart and found a
man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this
year, Bush's soulmate excoriated the U.S. for "an almost
uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world
into an abyss of conflicts."
America's foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan,
where Washington's full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent
the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the
struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and
imprisoning his country's supreme court justices. In one go,
with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez
Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of
promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking
a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al
Qaeda operatives.
"No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse
international situation than George W. Bush," says Richard
Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton
administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone
superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009
who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be
negotiated over the next two years.
America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath
of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at
the time of creating a "New World Order" of universal peace and
mutual prosperity.
Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and
foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping
up its military allies, America could have secured its new found
global supremacy by simply setting a good example.
Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral,
botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The
New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S.
hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision
that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers' next
target.
In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations
in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the
belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition
reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the
space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the "E
generation," as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling
United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of
American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism
of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous
unilateralism of George W. Bush.
Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change;
genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other
most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively
ceded its claim to the "benign hegemony" that still shapes
America's regard of its impact on the world.
And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton's view. In the
1990s, then-president Clinton declared that "America is the
indispensable nation." In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this
month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in
retirement from the White House, said, "The American people now
know something they've never known before. In their bones they
know that there's almost no problem we can solve all by
ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation,
climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a
co-operative way."
Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America's lone-superpower
status, has warned that "Seeing the United States reduced to
only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that
appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent –
so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
"They must have one," the London-based global military analyst
wrote. "Paramount powers facing relegation always have one,
although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever
works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching
up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire
economies."
Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that
status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to
be done. China is the world's second-largest CO2 emitter,
trailing only the U.S. India has the world's largest population
of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth
certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but
lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000
troops. Russia's regard for investors, whose property it
expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country's
entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.
The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America
well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global
influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake
here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem
to realize. They all talk of restoring America's respect in the
world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is
that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America
as "the shining city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan invoked.
With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the
U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels
between today's America and the decline of the Roman Empire.
Among the similarities Walker cited were "declining values and
political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended
military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the
central government."
Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower
would still be jeopardized by its "unsustainable" disregard for
tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a
yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship
for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets
in. "It's time to learn from history," Walker said, "and take
steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand
the test of time."
© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007
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