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The 21st Century will be an American century.
"The Next 100 Years" is a book written by intelligence consultant George Friedman. I have to decided to begin posting excerpts from the book
Here's Chapter 1:
The Dawn of the American Age
There is a deep-seated belief in America that the United States is approaching the eve of its destruction. Read letters to the editor, peruse the Web, and listen to public discourse. Disastrous wars, uncontrolled deficits, high gasoline prices, shootings at universities, corruption in business and government, and an endless litany of other shortcomings - all of them quite real - create a sense that the American dream has been shattered and that America is past its prime. If that doesn't convince you, listen to the Europeans. They will assure you that America's best day is behind it.
The odd thing is that all of this foreboding was present during the presidency of Ricahrd Nixon, together with many of the same issues. There is a continual fear that American power and prosperity are illusory, and that disaster is just around the corner. The sense transcends ideology. Environmentalists and Christian conservatives are both delivering the same message. Unless we repent our ways, we will pay the price - and it may be too late already
It's interesting to note that the nation that believes in its manifest destiny has not only a sense of impending disaster but a nagging feeling that the country simply isn't what it used to be. We have a deep sense of nostalgia for the 1950s as a "simpler" time. This is quite a strange belief. With the Korean War and McCarthy at one end, Little Rock in the middle, and Sputnik and Berlin at the other end, and the very real threat of nuclear war throughout, the 1950s was actually a time of intense anxiety and foreboding. A widely read book published in the 1950s was entitled The Age of Anxiety. In the 1950s, they looked back nostalgically at an earlier America, just as we look back nostalgically at the 1950s.
American culture is the manic combination of exultant hubris and profound gloom. The net result is a sense of confidence constantly undermined by the fear that we may be drowned by melting ice caps caused by global warming or smitten dead by a wrathful God for gay marriage, both outcomes being our personal responsibility. American mood swings make it hard to develop a real sense of the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But the fact is that the United States is stunningly powerful. It may be that it is heading for a catastrophe, but it is hard to see one when you look at the basic facts.
Let's consider some illuminating figures. Americans constitute about 4 percent of the world's population but produce about 26 percent of all goods and services. In 2007 U.S. gross domestic product was about $14 trillion, compared to the world's GDP of $54 trillion - about 26 percent of the world's economic activity takes place in the United States. The next largest economy in the world is Japan's, with aGDP of about $4.4 trillion - about a third the size of ours. The American economy is so huge that it is larger than the economies of the next four countries combined: Japan, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom.
Many people point at the declining auto and steel industries, which a generation ago were the mainstays of the American economy, as examples of a current deindustrialization of the United States. Certainly, a lot of industry has moved overseas. That has left the United States with industrial production of only $2.8 trillion (in 2006): the largest in the world, more than twice the size of the next largest industrial power, Japan, and larger than Japan's and China's industries combined.
There is talk of oil shortages, which certainly seem to exist and will undoubtedly increase. However, it is important to realize that the United States produced 8.3 million barrels of oil every day in 2006. Compare that with 9.7 million for Russia and 10.7 million for Saudi Arabia. U.S. oil production is 85 percent that of Saudi Arabia. The United States produces more oil than Iran, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates. Imports of oil into the country are vast, but given its industrial production, that's understandable. Comparing natural gas production in 2006, Russia was in first place with 22.4 trillion cubic feet and the United States was second with 18.7 trillion cubic feet. U.S. natural gas production is greater than that of the next five producers combined. In other words, although there is great concer that the United States is wholly dependent on foreign energy, it is actually one of the world's largest energy producers.
Given the vast size of the American economy, it is interesting to note that the United States is still underpopulated by global standards. Measured in inhabitants per square kilometer, the world's average population density is 49. Japan's is 338, Germany's is 230, and America's is only 31. If we exclude Alaska, which is largley uninhabitable, U.S. population density rises to 34. Compared to Japan or Germany, or the rest of Europe, the United States is highly underpopulated. Even when we simply compare population in proportion to arable land - land that is suitable for agriculture - America has five times as much land per person as Asia, almost twice as much as Europe, and three times as much as the global average. An economy consists of land, labor, and capital. In the case of the United States, these numbers show that the nation can still grow - it has plenty of room to increase all three.
There are many answers to the question of why the U.S. economy is so powerful, but the simplest answer is military power. The United States completely dominates a continent that is invulnerable to invasion and occupation and in which its military overwhelms those of its neighbors. Virtually every other industrial power in the world has experienced devastating warfare in the twentieth century. The United States waged war, but America itself never experienced it. Mliitary power and geographical reality created an economic reality. Other countries have lost time recovering from wars. The United States has not. It has actually grown because of them.
Consider this simple fact that I"ll be returning to many times. The United States Navy controls all of the oceans of the world. Whether it's a junk in the South China Sea, a dhow off the African coast, a tanker in the Persian Gulf, or a cabin cruiser in the Caribbean, every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed - or denied - at will by the U.S. Navy.
This has never happened before in human history, even with Britain. There have been regionally dominant navies, but never one that was globally and overwhelmingly dominant. This has meant that the United States could invade other countries - but never be invaded. It has meant that in the final analysis the United States controls international trade. It has become the foundation of American security and American wealth. Control of the seas emerged after World War II, solidified during the final phase of the European Age, and is now the flip side of American economic power, the basis of its military power.
Whatever passing problems exist for the United States, the most important factor in world affairs is the tremendous imbalance of economic, military, and political power. Any attempt to forecast the twenty-first century that does not begin with the recognition of the extraordinary nature of American power is out of touch with reality. But I am making a broader, more unexpected claim, too: the United States is only at the beginning of its power. The twenty-first century will be the American century.
That answer rests on a deeper point. For the past five hundred years, the global system has rested on the power of Atlantic Europe, the European countries that bordered on the Atlantic Ocean: Portugal, Spain, France, England, and to a lesser exten the Netherlands. These countries transformed the world, creating the first global political and economic system in human history. As we know, European power collapsed during the twentieth century, along with the European empires. This created a vacuum that was filled by the United States, the dominant power in North America, and the only great power bordering both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. North America has assumed the place that Europe occupied for five hundred years, between Columbus's voyage in 1492 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has become the center of gravity of the international system.
Why? In order to understand the twenty-first century, it is important to understand the fundamental structural shifts that took place late in the twentieth century, setting the stage for a new century that will be radically different in form and substance, just as the United States is so different from Europe. My argument is not only that something extraordinary has happ-ened but that the United States has had very little choice in it. This isn't about policy. It is about the way in which impersonal geopolitical forces work.
Europe
Until the fifteenth century, humans lived in self-enclosed, sequestered worlds. Humanity did not know itself as consisting of a single fabric. The Chinese didn't know of the Aztecs, and the Mayas didn't know of the Zulus. The Europeans may have heard of the Japanese, but they didn't really know them - and they certainly didn't interact with them. The Tower of Babel had done more than make it impossible for people to speak to each other. It made civilizations oblivious to each other.
Europeans living on the eastern rim of the Atlantic Ocean shattered the barriers between these sequestered regions and turned the world into a single entity in which all of the parts interacted with each other. What happened to Australian aborigines was intimately connected to the British relationship with Ireland and the need to find penal colonies for British prisoners overseas. What happened to Inca kings was tied to the relationship between Spain and Portugal. The imperialism of Atlantic Europe created a single world.
Atlantic Europe became the center of gravity of the global system. What happened in Europe defined much of what happened elsewhere in the world. Other nations and regions did everything with one eye on Europe. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century hardly any part of the world escaped European influence and power. Everything, for good or evil, revovled around it. And the pivot of Europe was the North Atlantic. Whoever controlled that stretch of water controlled the highway to the world.
Europe was neither the most civilized nor the most advanced region in the world. So what made it the center? Europe really was a technical and intellectual backwater in the fifteenth century as opposed to China or the Islamic world. Why these small, out-of-the-way countries? And why did they begin their domination then and not five hundred years before or five hundred years later?
European power was about two things: money and geography. Europe depended on imports from Asia, particularly India. Pepper, for example, was not simply a cooking spice but also a meat preservative; its importation was a critical part of the European economy. Asia was filled with luxury goods that Europe needed, and would pay for, and historically Asian imports would come overland along the famous Silk Road and other routes until reaching the Mediterranean. The rise of Turkey - about which much more will be heard in the twenty-first century - closed these routes and increased the cost of imports.
European traders were desperate to find a way around the Turks. Spaniards and Portuguese - the Iberians - chose the nonmilitary alternative: they sought another route to India. The Iberians knew of only one route to India that avoided Turkey, down the length of the African coast and up into the Indian Ocean. They theorized about another route, assuming that the world was round, a route that would them to India by going west.
This was a unique moment. At other points in history Atlantic Europe would have only fallen even deeper into backwardness and poverty. But the economic pain was real and the Turks were very dangerous, so there was pressure to do something. It was also a crucial psychological moment. The Spaniards, having just expelled the Muslims from Spain, were at the height of their barbaric hubris. Finally, the means for carrying out such exploration was at hand as well. Technology existed that, if properly used, might provide a solution to the Turkey problem.
The Iberians had a ship, the caravel, that could handle deep-sea voyages. They had an array of navigational devices, from the compass to the astrolabe. Finally they had guns, particularly cannons. All of these might have been borrowed from other cultures, but the Iberians integrated them into an effective economic and military system. They could now sail to distant places. When they arrived they were able to fight - and win. People who heard a cannon fire and saw a building explode tended to be more flexible in negotiations. When the Iberians reached their destinations, they could kick in the door and take over. Over the next several centuries, European ships, guns, and money dominated the world and created the first global system, the European age.
Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire - there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on. The Europeans exhausted themselves in endless wars with each other while they invaded, subjugated, and eventually ruled much of the world.
There were many reasons for the inability of the Europeans to unite, but in the end it came down to a simple feature of geography: the English Channel. First the Spanish, then the French, and finally the Germans managed to dominate the European continent, but none of them could cross the Channel. Because no one could defeat Britain, conqueror after conqueror failed to hold Europe as a whole. Periods of peace were simply temporary truces. Europe was exhausted by the advent of World War I, in which over ten million men died - a good part of a generation. Europe emerged as a demographic, economic, and cultural shadow of its former self. And then things got even worse.
The Final Battle of an Old Age
The United States emerged from World War I as a global power. That power was clearly in its infancy, however. Geopolitically, the Europeans had another fight in them, and psychologically the Americans were not yet ready for a permanent place on the global stage. But two things did happen. In World War I the United States announced its presence with resounding authority. And the United States left a ticking time bomb in Europe that would guarantee America's power after the next war. That time bomb was the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I - but left unresolved the core conflicts over which the war had been fought. Versailles guaranteed another round of war.
And the war did resume in 1939, twenty-one years after the last one ended. Germany again attacked first, this time conquering Frace in six weeks. The United States stayed out of the war for a time, but made sure that the war didn't end in a German victory. Britain stayed in the war, and the United States kept it there with Lend-Lease. We all remember the Lend part - where the United States provided Britain with destroyers and other materiel to fight the Germans - but the Lease part is usually forgotten. The Lease part was where the British turned over almost all their naval facilities in the Western Hemisphere to the United States. Between control of these facilities and the role the U.S. Navy played in patrolling the Atlantic, the British were forced to hand the Americans the keys to the North Atlantic, which was, after all, Europe's highway to the world.
A reasonable estimate of World War II's cost to the world was about fifty million dead (military and civilian deaths combined). Europe had torn itself to shreds in this war, and nations were devastated. In contrast, the United States lost around half a million military dead and had almost no civilian casualties. At the end of the war, the American industrial plant was much stronger than before the war; the United States was the only combatant nation for which that was not the case. No American cities were bombed (excepting Pearl Harbor), no U.S. territory was occupied (except two small islands in the Aleutians), and the United States suffered less than 1 percent of the war's casualties.
For that price, the United States emerged from World War II not only controlling the North Atlantic but ruling all of the world's oceans. It also occupied Western Europe, shaping the destinies of countries like France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and indeed Great Britain itself. The United States simultaneously conquered and occupied Japan, almost as an afterthought to the European campaign.
Thus did the Europeans lose their empire - partly out of exhaustion, partly from being unable to bear the cost of holding it, and partly because the United States simply did not want them to continue to hold it. The empire melted away over the next twenty years, with only desultory resistance by the Europeans. The geopolitical reality(that could first be seen in Spain's dilemma centuries before) had played itself out to a catastrophic finish.
Here's a question: Was the United States' clear emergence in 1945 as the decisive global power a brilliant Machiavellian play? The Americans achieved global preeminence at the cost of 500,000 dead, in a war where fifty million others perished. Was Franklin Roosevelt brilliantly unscrupulous, or did becoming a superpower just happen in the course of his pursuing the "four freedoms" and the UN Charter? In the end, it doesn't matter. In geopolitics, the unintended consquences are the most important ones.
The U.S.-Soviet conflict - known as the Cold War - was a truly global conflict. It was basically a competition over who would inherit Europe's tattered global empire. Although there was vast military strength on both sides, the United States had an inherent advantage. The Soviet Union was enormous but essentially landlocked. America was almost as vast but had easy access to the world's oceans. While the Soviets could not contain the Americans, the Americans could certainly contain the Soviets. And that was the American strategy: to contain and thereby strangle the Soviets. From the North Cape of Norway to Turkey to the Aleutian Islands, the Untied States created a massive belt of allied nations, all bordering on the Soviet Union - a belt that after 1970 included China itself. At every point where the Soviets had a port, they found themselves blocked by geography and the United States Navy.
Geopolitics has two basic competing views of geography and power. One view, held by an Englishman, Halford John Mackinder, argues that control of Eurasia means the control of the world. As he put it: "Who rules East Europe(Russian Europe) commands the Heartland. Who rules the World-Island commands the world." This thinking dominated British strategy and, indeed, U.S. strategy in the Cold War, as it fought to contain and strangle European Russia. Another view is held by an American, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, considered the greatest American geopolitical thinker. In his book The Influence of Sea Power on History, Mahan makes the counterargument to Mackinder, arguing that control of the sea equals command of the world.
History confirmed that both were right, in a sense. Mackinder was correct in emphasizing the significance of a powerful and united Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union elevated the United States to the level of sole global power. But it was Mahan, the American, who understood two crucial factors. The collapse of the Soviet Union originated in American sea power and also opened the door for U.S. naval power to dominate the world. Additionally, Mahan was correct when he argued that it is always cheaper to ship goods by sea than by any other means. As far back as the fifth century B.C., the Athenians were wealthier than the Spartans because Athens had a port, a maritime fleet, and a navy to protect it. Maritime powers are always wealthier than nonmaritime neighbors, all other things being equal. With the advent of globalization in the fifteenth century, this truth became as near to absolute as one can get in geopolitics.
U.S. control of the sea meant that the United States was able not only to engage in but to define global maritime trade. It could make the rules, or at least block anyone else's rules, by denying other nations entry to the world's trade routes. In general, the United States shaped the international trading system more subtly, by using access to the vast American market as a lever to shape the behavior of other nations. It was not surprising, then, that in addition to its natural endowments, the United States became enormously prosperous from its sea power and that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly compete, being landlocked.
Second, having control of the seas gave the United States a huge political advantage as well. American could not be invaded, but it could invade other countries - whenever and however it chose. From 1945 onward, the United States could wage wars without fear of having its lines of supply cut. No outside power could wage war on the continent of North America. In fact, no other nation could mount amphibious operations without American acquiscence. When the British went to war with Argentina over the Falklands in 1982, for example, it was possible only because the United States didn't prevent it. When the British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt in 1956 against U.S. wishes, they had to withdraw.
Throughout the Cold War, an alliance with the United States was always more profitable than an alliance with the Soviet Union. The Soviets could offer arms, political support, some technology, and a host of other things. But the Americans could offer access to their international trading system and the right to sell into the American economy. This dwarfed everything else in importance. Exclusion from the system meant impoverishment; inclusion in the system meant wealth. Consider, as an example, the different fates of North and South Korea, West and East Germany.
It is interesting to note that throughout the Cold War, the United States was on the defensive psychologically. Korea, McCarthyism, Cuba, Vietnam, Sputnik, left-wing terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, and harsh criticism of Reagan by European allies all created a sense of gloom and uncertainty in America. Atmospherics gave the United States the continual sense that its advantage in the Cold War was slipping away. Yet underneath the hood, in the objective reality of power relations, the Russians never had a chance. This disjuncture between the American psyche and geopolitical reality is important to remember for two reasons. First, it reveals the immaturity of American power. Second, it reveals a tremendous strength. Because the United States was insecure, it generated a level of effort and energy that was overwhelming. There was nothing casual or confident in the way the Americans - from political leaders to engineers to military and intelligence officers - waged the Cold War.
That is one of the primary reasons the United States was surprised when it won the Cold War. The United States and its alliance had the Soviet Union surrounded. The Soviets could not afford to challenge the Americans at sea and had instead to devote their budget to building armies and missiles, and they could not match American economic growth rates or entice their allies with economic benefits. The Soviet Union fell further and further behind. And then it collapsed.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 499 years after Columbus's expedition, ended an entire age in history. For the first time in half a millenium, power no longer resided in Europe, nor was Europe the focal point of international competition. After 1991, the sole global power in the world was the United States, which had become the center of the international system.
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We have examined how the Untied States came to power in the twentieth century. There is one additional accompanying fact - a little-studied statistic that I mentioned earlier and that speaks volumes. In 1980, as the U.S.-Soviet duel was moving to its climax, transpacific trade rose to equal transatlantic trade for the first time in history. A mere ten years later, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, transpacific trade had soared to a level 50 percent greater than transatlantic trade. The entire geometry of international trade, and therefore of the global system, was undergoing an unparalleled shift.
How did this affect the rest of the world? Quite simply, the cost of sea lane control is enormous. Most trading countries can't bear the cost of controlling sea lanes and therefore depend on nations that do have the resources to do so. Naval powers therefore acquire enormous political leverage, and other nations don't want to challenge them. The cost of controlling an adjacent body of water is expensive. The cost of controlling a body of water thousands of miles away is overwhelming. Historically, there have been only a handful of nations that have been able to bear that expense - and it's no easier or cheaper today. Take a look at the U.S. defense budget and the amount spent on the navy and on related space systems. The cost of maintaining carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf is a greater outlay than the total defense budgets of most countries. Controlling the Atlantic or the Pacific without a shoreline on both would be beyond the economic capability of just about any nation.
North American alone can house a transcontinental nation capable of projecting power simultaneously into the Atlantic and Pacific. Therefore North America is the center of gravity of the international system. At teh dawn of the American age, the United States is far and away the dominant power in North America. It is a country that simultaneously invaded Europe and Japan in 1944-45. It took military control of both bodies of water and retains it to this day. This is why it is in a position to preside over the new age.
But it is important to recall that Spain once dominated Europe and presided over the opening century of the European Age. While I expect that North America will be the center of gravity of the global system for the next few centuries, I also expect the United States to dominate North America for at least a century. But as with Spain, the assertion that North America is the center of gravity does not guarantee that the United States will always dominate North America. Many things can happen - from civil war to defeat in a foreign war to other states emerging on its borders over the centuries.
For the short term, however - and by that I mean the next hundred years - I will argue that the United States' power is so extraordinarily overwhelming, and so deeply rooted in economic, technological, and cultural realities, that the country will continue to surge through the twenty-first century, buffeted thought it will be by wars and crises.
This isn't incompatible with American self-doubt. Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity. Interestingly, this is the precise description of the adolescent mind, and that is exactly the American condition in the twenty-first century. The world's leading power is having an extended adolescent identity crisis, complete with incredible new strength and irrational mood swings. Historically, the United States is an extraodinarily young and therefore immature society. So at this time we should expect nothing less from American than bravado and despair. How else should an adolescent feel about itself and its place in the world?
But if we think of the United States as an adolescent, early in its overall history, then we also know that, regardless of its self-image, adulthood lies ahead. Adults tend to be more stable and more powerful than adolescents. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that America is in the earliest phase of its power. It is not fully civilized. America, like Europe in the sixteenth century, is still barbaric(a description, not a moral judgement). Its culture is unformed. Its will is powerful. Its emotions drive it in different and contradictory directions.
Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn't live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.
Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.
Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey. Until now it has not been sufficiently coherent to have a definitive culture. As it becomes the center of gravity of the world, it is developing that culture, which is inevitably barbaric. America is a place where the right wing despises Muslims for their faith and the left wing despises them for their treatment of women. Such seemingly different perspectives are tied together in the certainty that their own values are self-evidently best. And as with all barbaric cultures, Americans are ready to fight for their self-evident truths.
This is not meant as criticism, any more than an adolescent can be criticized for being an adolescent. It is a necessary and inevitable state of development. But the United States is a young culture and as such it is clumsy, direct, at times brutal, and frequently torn by deep internal dissension - its dissidents being united only in the certainty that their values are best. The United States is all of these things, but as with Europe in the sixteenth century, the United States will, for all of its apparent bumbling, be remarkably effective.
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Originally Posted by Curtis24
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