Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  THE NEW RULES: FROM “UNITED WE STAND” TO DEMOGRAPHIC DEMAGOGUERY

  Some observers increasingly preach the notion that a global economy no longer so dominated by America represents a post-American age, when in truth it represents our greatest achievement: the extension of our very American-style liberal trade order. Do not fall under the spell of this most subtle fearmongering, because it encourages accommodation through defeatism when the world needs our self-confident leadership now more than ever. That the rest of the planet doesn’t immediately ape our mature embrace of the political, economic, and social implications of that order need not blind us to our continuing role as global revolutionaries, for again, our own achievements in all those categories were long in the making. In effect, by expanding our American System-cum-globalization so rapidly around the planet in recent years, we’ve simply exposed ourselves, in an inverted fashion, to a far greater universe of “stationary states” whose populations have, for all practical purposes, virtually emigrated to our now globalized “land of opportunity.” As a result, we now find ourselves, for the first time in this grand strategic process, adjusting more to globalization than globalization adjusts to us.

  That naturally scares us, but it shouldn’t. Politics will always lag behind economics. It has throughout our nation’s history and it does so today. But that doesn’t mean we should—in our immediate fears—attempt to remake the Gap militarily when our globalization source code does that with a frightening speed all its own. If, in our patience, we choose to recognize our younger economic and—especially—political selves in these rising powers that now appear to offer us challenge, we’ll effectively migrate the planet down a path that enables states collectively to mitigate dangers like terrorism and global warming in the short run, while forcing societies toward sustainable development choices that ultimately conquer these threats over the long haul. That strategic vision cannot be described on the margins of globalization’s bell curve but only in its vast middle. Thus, the global narrative we seek must be one that links America’s middle-class ideology to globalization’s emerging middle class, for it is there that the expanding Core as a whole will ultimately stand united.

  America simply cannot obtain a quorum for such global change either at home, amid our own beleaguered middle class, or abroad in a demographically moribund West. We are forced by our success in spreading our American System-cum-globalization to cast our nets further. Adjusting to that success is the primary task of American grand strategy today, not cowering in fear from globalization’s competitive landscape or the political immaturity of its rising powers. That’s like the father fearing the son for his strength while condemning him for his lack of wisdom, when we should exploit the former to trigger the latter’s emergence. That’s why, whenever I hear an American politician proclaim the need to strengthen the Western alliance, I know that leader proposes to steer by our historical wake instead of crafting a forward-looking grand strategy. Recapturing past glory is not recapturing our youth but denying our parentage of this world we inhabit so uneasily today.

  Our most immediate challenge right now is avoiding the temptation to define our own middle-class security in terms of walls that shut out “unfair” competition, when we should recognize globalization’s open frontiers for the same opportunity they’ve always presented Americans: the chance to redefine ourselves. For example, the global economy, in its rapid growth, can no longer subsist on a single reserve currency—the dollar. More balance and flexibility are required beyond the sort of once-every-decade Plaza Accord-style agreements to shift the dollar’s value in tectonic trajectories. We fear that brave new world as much as we did when Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971; we worry that the world won’t respect—and possibly fear—us as it once did. But here’s the deal: We lured them into this liberal trade order and they’re doing the best they can with it right now, many of them scaling production chains at rates that defy historical predictions. Our job is the same as it’s always been: stay out in front in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, recognizing the need for new rule sets as they appear. American history serves as guide: When our stock market crashed in 1929, we responded with new regulatory institutions. Now we face that task on a global level.

  On the more personal level, Americans should remain grateful that we’re still a fertile nation, one that continues to attract both high-skilled and low-skilled labor. We are unlike Europe or Japan in that our synthetic culture allows for assimilation, meaning we’ll manage our aging population in a manner unique in the world. By 2025, rapidly aging Europe and Japan will be shrinking in size while we’re still adding almost 3 million people a year. We’ll sport the highest growth rate among developed countries, as well as one of the lowest median ages. We’ll also be the only sizable developed country where the kids still outnumber the elders. As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt argues, “Such trends might reinforce U.S. international prominence—even though the divergence in demographic profiles between the United States and other developed countries may also portend an era of diminishing affinities between the United States and its historical Western allies.”

  That’s just one of the many demographic hints staring us in the face regarding future allies. In a world of economic frontier integration, the regions that simultaneously “rise” and export labor are the natural network-builders and infrastructure-builders. Europe played this role in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; now Asia does the same. Between them, China and India have placed over 50 million workers abroad, with Indians in America emerging as the new Jews: disproportionately well educated, well paid, and increasingly well connected politically. As for East Asians in America, well, there the stereotypes are already well established—the super-students who crush all competition. Yes, in the short term there will be spy scandals and fear factors associated with foreign corporate takeovers, but if demography is destiny, then alliances are allocated accordingly.

  Yet there is such cultural angst in America regarding the “loss” of Europe and so much fuss generated by our aging Boomer leaders regarding the need to “save” or “resurrect” or “repair” the transatlantic relationship, when truth be told, “grandpa” is coming along for the ride no matter who’s sitting in the front seat with us. Europe, with its postreligious identity (lest it be once again fused with nationalism and lead to civil wars), is desperately scared by the challenges of assimilating an Islamic underclass that performs the so-called 3D jobs—dirty, dangerous, and difficult. Unlike America’s similarly employed Hispanics, who present themselves in the familiar spiritual garb of Catholicism, Europe’s Muslims resurrect fears there of an invading horde determined to subvert democracy just as the pooled European identity seems perfected. In reality, these ambitious immigrants (if they weren’t, they would have stayed home) will naturally avail themselves—if properly incentivized—of democracy’s many avenues of redress to press their economic and political demands. Sure, today’s political fires will often be lit by street protests, but that is how political movements are often birthed. Europe’s challenge is to facilitate either the rise of new political parties that represent these immigrants’ needs directly or the incorporation of their agendas within existing ones, a process already begun in France, where in the 2007 elections immigrant minorities ran for parliamentary seats in record numbers.

  For every frightened pundit (see Mark Steyn’s America Alone) who sees his European heritage disappearing in a tide of Islam, there’s a next-generation globalist (see Parag Khanna’s The Second World) who sees the EU effectively rebranding itself and ambitiously integrating new frontiers both eastward and southward in coming decades. Some will argue that Europe can incorporate only more Europeans, stretching that definition to Russia’s doorstep but denying Turkey, but since Western Europe’s plunging birthrates have already spread eastward with stunning speed, a southward integration strategy is inevitable, meaning Europe’s cultural center of gravity will once again center on the Med
iterranean—hardly the end of the world as we know it. In fact, Spain’s recent “open border” policy, resulting in a population that’s roughly one-quarter (!) foreign-born (most just south across the sea), demonstrates the sort of shocking therapy that invariably all European countries will be forced to adopt in order to stop their aging populations from turning their economies into globalization’s stagnant backwaters.

  None of this will be easy, and if America is any example, the aging West will veer between periods of openness and retrenchment, with economic stagnation triggering the former and political violence the latter. Every wave of new immigrants in America, going all the way back to the early seventeenth century, has fought to close the door behind it—yesterday’s “niggers” invariably become tomorrow’s Know-Nothings. My own Irish ancestors provide a perfect example in this regard, triggering in their early-nineteenth-century bow wave the rise of public education in America (lest those “filthy” Papists spread their undemocratic ways), only to become, by the end of that same century, nativists of the worst sort determined to stop the flood of East Europeans! But in the end, it’s all about assimilation and political inclusiveness; otherwise a ghettoized underclass results, like France’s Muslims today. You can say the problem is immigration or religious difference, but rising incomes tend to close all cultural gaps—meaning economic achievement drives political accommodation rather than the other way around. That’s not to say that France can’t effectively cycle new Muslim immigrants through les cités, because it does to a certain extent, but rather that these inner-city ghettos will present a constant political sore until they are properly mobilized in a political sense.

  Again, the American System proves to be modern globalization’s first and still best example of the way ahead. Between 1978 and 2002, the percentage of foreign-born Americans doubled from 6 percent to 12 percent, even as our five-year average unemployment rate dropped. Why no great social unrest? Among immigrants, median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every decade they remained in the country. The same financial experiments that triggered the subprime crisis likewise made it easier for immigrant Hispanics in America to buy homes, so don’t toss out all of those debt-spreading financial instruments just yet, because the potential long-term political losses may end up being even more profound than the temporary economic hit. Obviously, if you want stakeholders in either your American System or globalization as a whole, then you need to give them the opportunity to create stakes (and as global risk management goes, this is pennies on the dollar compared with military interventions). Hispanics are expected to make up 40 percent of first-time home buyers in America over the next two decades. As for cultural assimilation, it proceeds apace. Only 40 percent of Mexican immigrants go to college, but nearly two-thirds of the second-generation Mexican-Americans do. By the third generation, three-quarters speak nothing but English. One out of four first-generation Hispanic immigrants intermarry with whites, but one-third of American-born Hispanics do the same.

  But if none of that assuages your fears, let the following speak to your greed. Immigrant Latinos open new businesses at a rate three times the national norm. They’re also replenishing the ranks of American farm labor just as our agricultural business hits an inflection point in response to the global economy’s skyrocketing demand for food. If you’re a Boomer heading into retirement, you need immigrants to do well economically, because their rising incomes are going to replenish your retirement coffers, not to mention allow you to sell your house. Since the end of the Cold War, 80 percent of population growth in this country has come in the form of African-American and Hispanic-American kids, yet they’re not getting the same schooling as their white counterparts. This isn’t about closing our borders to make sure America’s middle class doesn’t disappear, this is about keeping our borders open to make sure we have a middle class several decades down the road. The challenges we face today—as we did in post-Civil War America—are the same ones the Core faces with the New Core’s emerging economies as well as the Gap’s developing economies and failed states: We are forced to recognize that tomorrow’s global middle class will rise from their frontier ranks. The nativists are absolutely correct: Our culture is on the line. But the culture that matters most here is our economic culture—our ability to nurture entrepreneurship. The rest will be a mashed-up social remix that only our children will find readily recognizable.

  The temptation to reach for shortcuts here, again, is profound. To insist you only want highly educated immigrants ignores the demographics, but clearly every advanced economy is scrambling for top technological and management talent, so there’s plenty of logic in offering special packages. Hell, if serving in our military gets you instant citizenship, then a Ph.D. in one of our universities (even in their satellite facilities abroad) might make an equally utilitarian golden ticket. As for the longer-term fear that we’ll be overrun with impoverished immigrants, history says otherwise. As Michael Barone points out, America’s East Coast was awash with Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1960s, fueled in large part because of increasingly cheap connectivity (especially airfares), but that flow tapered off once Puerto Rico’s per capita income rose to about one-third of America’s. At that point, the purchasing-power differential washed out and Puerto Ricans, on average, preferred staying home. In the more distant past, the same dynamics could be spotted in the flows of immigrants from Europe and Asia: Once their economies grew enough, the flow diminished spectacularly. So the answer isn’t building a bigger wall along our southern border, where more Hispanics die each year trying to cross than did East Germans scaling over or tunneling under the Berlin Wall across its entire history. Rather, it’s about raising income levels in Latin America through further trade and economic integration, a strategic goal congressional Democrats casually trashed last year in their treatment of Colombia’s proposed free-trade agreement. To that end, an America that isn’t fifteen to twenty states bigger by 2050 is missing the boat—and simply inviting more boat people.

  That’s where the growing European Union truly outperforms the United States today: Those populations that it grows weary of beating back are ultimately asked to join. That the EU can add stars while our flag remains fixed at fifty is a sad reflection of our continued Cold War tendency to favor the status quo over system expansion, and to presume our world order is defined in political-military terms instead of economic liberty. Mexico has provided us with numerous new states in the past and it should do so in the future. The economic merger was forged with NAFTA; we simply refuse to admit the logic of complete acquisition. Would the price be too steep? If you want to keep the “old” America from becoming too Hispanic, you’d better think about extending the “new” America farther southward, because global warming is going to exacerbate the northward flow beyond past expectations of sustainability, so we either pay soon or pay later.

  America’s absorption of its Western frontiers constituted the most troubling and transformative period of our history. Even as we conceived our “manifest destiny,” our acquisition was largely defensive—as in, better us than them. Eventually, we’ll be forced into a similarly aggressive mindset regarding the courting of an emerging global middle class: We’ll come to believe that if our ideology doesn’t reign supreme, its survival will be put at risk—along with the American System itself. For now, we have the luxury of viewing this struggle with the relatively weak forces of antiglobalization, currently embodied by radical Islam, as a war of discipline. But it remains so only because globalization’s frontline “settlers” today are primarily Asians. Over time, their success in developing a world-spanning middle class will present us with a rule-set clash of truly global proportions—unless we shape and ultimately conquer that ideological space first. In this regard, we have to stop playing China’s “useful idiot” and start making it our own, more self-aware partner. This is what the next generation of warfare will be all about: achieving nonkinetic victories by steering other nations’ ambitions.

&
nbsp; Our historical moment of declaring such victories America’s and America’s alone has passed. Our global economic model of integration, now firmly in place, requires no such braggadocio on our part. Let China, as it slowly forges an Asian union in coming years, pretend it is reinventing our wheel, just as Europeans do today, because, in the end, our model of states uniting in multinational security, economic, and political union will kill state-on-state war there, just as it did in Europe, marking America as the most pacifying force in human history.

  THE NEW NORMAL: APOCALYPSE SOON

  Both pre- and postmillennialism have thrived in America’s competitive religious landscape over the past two-plus centuries, with the majority view tending toward the latter perspective. In postmillennialism, human progress contributes to the realization of God’s ultimate design, meaning the “end times” come after we make this Earth worthy of God’s return. In premillennialism, God’s return starts the global renovation for real. Premillennialism is escapism at its spiritual core: “I can’t stand/change this evil world and so I wait for God’s intervention to accomplish this for me.” Postmillennialism captures the Protestant work ethic most commonly associated with American-style capitalism: “God wants me to live long and prosper, remaking this world in his/my image.” When times are good, the sort of death-wish fantasies of premillennialism tend to remain on the fringes of society. When times are uncertain, certainty is sought in such notions, making premillennialism the spiritual foodstuff of losers—“We’re not worthy!”