The Demographic Shift
Because globalization in general favors the aging of populations through industrialization and urbanization, the rising importance of elder issues will constitute the long-term trend for the twenty-first century—especially as life-lengthening biological advances kick in. On the other hand, the rapid expansion of the global economy has connected a lot of youth-dominated countries to those rapidly aging, postindustrial powers of the West, setting up the first half of the twenty-first century for a significant amount of age tension between an elder Core and a very young Gap. There is no Progressive Era corollary to this phenomenon. At best we can cite a certain similarity between the youth-connecting role played by rock ’n’ roll during the Cold War and hip-hop in the current globalization era. As such, to the extent that Core governments seek to implement strategic communications in the direction of the Gap’s restless youth, they would do well to partner themselves with the main private-sector purveyors of youth mass media content and the online communities where much of this social behavior is now conducted. Of course, the Middle East’s current youth bulge cannot be socialized away as a source of instability, it can only be integrated as a new cheap pool of labor in the global economy. To the extent the governments of the Middle East are successful in migrating that youth bulge into gainful private-sector employment, their ability to communicate effectively with this newly empowered and relatively well-networked (compared with their parents) cohort will go a long way in deciding how stable the region is in coming decades. So while I might not advocate a direct U.S. government strategic communications program aimed at this population, I could certainly see the Core as a whole being highly interested in helping local governments get better in such communications on their own.
The Health Shift
As the Gap middle ages and the Core’s elder population balloons, the world as a whole is set to see a huge explosion in medical burden costs. This could be a source of great political instability, as futurologist Robert J. Shapiro argues, when “people seek treatments that neither they nor their governments can afford.” America has long suffered the dynamic by which more generous state health care and welfare programs draw in destitute populations from neighboring states. We are likely to see such “medical refugees” swell in numbers in coming years. Approached in a bottom-of-the-pyramid manner, such rising global demand can be effectively processed as a growing business opportunity, meaning, for example, that India doesn’t just offer cheap medical alternatives to Westerners but begins to market such services “downward” to developing economies, as Brazil and India have already done in the manner of cheap generic drugs. In the same way that regional hospitals are developed in America to service populations that otherwise would be forced to travel long distances, the Core’s future foreign aid efforts should focus on generating similar medical pillars in Gap regions. In general, then, the progressive agenda item here involves pushing reasonably priced capabilities down the economic pyramid in order to stem unsustainable people flows. As the current migration of American seniors into Central American countries demonstrates, people will move to access more affordable medical care environments. Another progressive agenda item would be to stem the “downshifting” of negative health behaviors from advanced economies to emerging and developing ones. A classic example here is smoking. I would expect to see worldwide health campaigns on the part of Old Core countries to reduce such emerging burdens in New Core and Gap nations.
The Market Shift
The essential economic shift of coming decades will be toward what Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute have dubbed “natural capitalism.” By this they mean industrial-era business models are simply updated to take into account the limits of inorganic and organic resources on the planet—in effect, finally pricing them correctly. They see four strategies as paramount: (1) a radical increase in the efficient use of natural resources; (2) biomimicry to reduce waste (basically copycatting nature’s form of biodegradation); (3) shifting from a “goods and purchases” model of transactions to one that emphasizes “services and flows,” meaning business seeks to create closed-loop cycles with nature that are sustainable instead of draining, so goods and purchases are more intimately linked by price to their natural resource-base components; and (4) the encouragement of private- and public-sector investment in natural resources (“natural capital”). In many ways, the progressive agenda here revolves around reducing the “industrial metabolism” of national economies and the global economy as a whole. Historically, once nations achieve a certain level of development, they begin to think along these preservation lines, the result being an effort to set aside natural resources for future generations while exporting the dirtiest and most resource-consuming industries to other markets. Lovins et al.’s argument is simply that the planet as a whole has reached a development tipping point where exporting such problems abroad is no longer a sustainable option.
The Governance Shift
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama divides governments along two axes: the scope of their power and the strength of their power. In this manner, we can describe the governance ideal as strong states with limited scope. While state-building in failed states is relatively straightforward, meaning you’re trying to extend both scope and power, the real trick comes in maturing the political systems of emerging markets, where governments are often characterized by too much ambition on scope and not enough strength in their institutions—in other words, they try to do too much with too little. For most of the go-go nineties, when globalization was rapidly extending itself, the reformist notion held that the best way to fix such bad governments was by improving their policies (e.g., the Washington Consensus). The new emerging consensus focuses more on the strength of political institutions (rule of law) than on their particular policies, so more focus on good design than—at first—optimal functioning. As a concept, rule of law has long remained rather fuzzy, with some experts offering a “thin” definition of certain basic good laws (e.g., contracts, property rights) that must be put in place, and others offering a more “thick” definition of an overall culture of respect for legality. What’s important about this growing academic debate is this: We’re beginning to see the rise of a global dialogue on government best practices when it comes to income growth creation. Because the global economy has expanded to include such a wide variety of players now, we’re starting to enjoy the ability to compare and contrast government policies in the same way that businesses have long done with one another in any sector. The growing diversity of capitalism is becoming one of its global strengths, meaning there’s a growing competition among governments. As such, one of the key components of a global progressive agenda should be further collective research and dialogue on exactly what constitutes good rule of law, a concept—unlike democracy—that enjoys widespread global endorsement because of its focus on efficiency.
One crucial caveat here: America’s ability to influence this global debate is slowly diminishing. First, there’s the sheer competition from the EU’s courts as they confront the complex issues of integration and harmonization of the legal systems of member states. As these courts grow in their constitutional sophistication, their rulings represent an alternative to American courts. Second, U.S. courts have suffered a serious loss of international credibility owing to America’s overly aggressive prosecution of our “global war on terror,” especially in the realm of human rights, leading to, for example, European court decisions’ being increasingly cited by Canadian and Australian courts in preference to our own. Third, the increasingly conservative nature of the U.S. Supreme Court results in its growing unwillingness to consider the rulings of foreign judicial systems, reflecting a dangerously isolating hubris. These are, in aggregate, highly disturbing trends that portend a serious decline in America’s ability to export legal rule sets—a power we have enjoyed for decades. America’s global leadership in the legal realm, especially in the matter of good governa
nce, will be especially important as the world heads into an inevitable period of heightened regulation—reversing a three-decade trend of Western-led global deregulation—as globalization matures in the years ahead. This loss of influence is made all the worse by America’s ongoing financial crisis, which calls into serious question our long commitment to, and preaching of, limited government interference in economic affairs. In sum, just when the world is looking for innovative thinking on global risk management on the part of governments, our voice, and the great experience it represents in terms of our states-uniting and economies-integrating model, may be increasingly ignored.
The Class Shift
The fundamental political challenge we face today is that the biggest economic change going on right now is the rise of a global middle class, and because much of that emerging middle class is found within the confines of this era’s rising economic pillars, too many of America’s politicians are framing this dynamic more in terms of a nation-state challenge (“How do we counteract China?” “How do we respond to authoritarian capitalism?”) than in terms of a global economic opportunity (“How do we forge a global middle-class identity favorable to our grand strategy of extending our liberal international trade order?”). When the American System was its own model of globalization, the United States was blessed by the likes of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, three seminal leaders obsessed with shaping America so as to make it possible for the average man to succeed, their assumption being that good citizens start as economic stakeholders seriously interested in the country’s continued success. The toughest questions we face now are: How do we get such leaders not just for America but for the global economy as a whole? Can they be one and the same, or has America grown too distant from its progeny, globalization, for our leaders to play that role anymore?
Obviously, I believe the United States hasn’t grown so temporally or ideologically distant from its American System-cum-globalization to still display such farsighted global leadership, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book. Still, I will confess that I find the current uncertainty surrounding those questions to constitute the single biggest wild card I can come up with regarding future global scenarios. That’s not to say that I can’t imagine future “black swans” (read: Wall Street) that shift our perspectives suddenly and with great force, but rather that I remain confident that if such a grand strategic connection can be maintained between our citizens’ definition of a “good” America and a “good” globalization, there’s nothing out there that we can’t handle with aplomb.
We’re not staring at some American decline or “post-American” global future, but the universalization of a dream begun centuries ago when the first colonists reached these shores: the creation of a new model of living that would superempower all who partake of its challenges and responsibilities. Since that time we have gone forth and multiplied this model beyond all expectations: pacifying our hemisphere, then stopping Europe’s ceaseless wars, and then quieting a turbulent Asia. Then, at the apogee of our model’s success and attractiveness, we suffered a blow to our national psyche that we’ve spent seven long years trying to repair. We discovered that, just like every past era, this one brings enemies to our American System-cum-globalization’s advance. In fear and anger, we alienated old friends and turned away potential new ones with our frantic behavior, damaging our status as a world leader to such an extent that we ourselves begin to doubt in our own capacity to fill such a role in coming years. Maybe, we wonder, globalization has grown beyond us and doesn’t need us anymore. Maybe now’s the time we should look out for #1 (or maybe #2 or #3?) and do whatever it takes to succeed on this hot, flat, and crowded (oh, my!) world.
Or maybe we just close this global deal over the next couple of decades.
THE BETTER NORMAL: THE GREAT COMPROMISE
I will keep this last section short and sweet, by “walking the dog” through the previous chapters.
Our economic compromise is as follows: We asked you, the New Core East and South, to join this international liberal trade order so long restricted to just the Old Core West. Having done so, overwhelmingly on our terms (even if you were too smart to buy our fast-forwarding argument known as the Washington Consensus), our quid pro quo seems obvious enough: We need to do whatever it takes to meet your demand for a middle-class lifestyle within this global economy. So no, we won’t be cutting your legs out from under you on global warming, nor will we make unreasonable demands that you support us as much on the kinetics of this long war as you logically should on the follow-up state-building and market creation and infrastructure networking. As far as posses go, our rules will be come as you are and come when you can, because we’re no longer under any illusions about which half is harder—the war or the postwar.
Our diplomatic compromise is a bit trickier: If you connect your population in a broadband fashion to the global economy and its many networks, we’ll allow you to pursue control over content. If you can’t handle the MTV right away, or the pornography, or the “challenging” depictions of personal liberty that Western societies routinely produce, we’ll help you exercise some equivalent of “parental controls” over the flow. While we may find such censorship offensive from the standpoint of our mature democracies, we’re not too ignorant of our own history to realize that we didn’t reach this level of—if you’ll pardon the term—sophistication overnight, so we certainly shouldn’t expect you to accept such wide-open content as the initial requirement for aspiring to such global connectivity. We’re confident, based on our experience, that you’ll come to open up your controls over time, but we respect your need to go slow at first. While we believe that all people want the same basic things out of life, we recognize that life is a journey each of us—either individually or collectively—must take at a pace of our choosing. That’s an essential freedom we recognize too. As long as you give your people the essential choice of stay-or-go on the basis of this new connectivity, how you regulate its flow internally should remain your political decision and yours alone.
On security, our offer is a simple one: In this increasingly connected world, dangers know no boundaries, so we’re done with trying to firewall ourselves off from scary things and have come to understand that our homeland is only as secure as every other homeland to which it is connected. Along these lines, experience has taught us that certain minimal rule sets must be obeyed by any and all who interact with us economically and socially. If you accept this minimal rule set, then we’ll promise to document all our kills in defense of these proposed global rules. If either the rules or our execution come under question, we’ll listen to your complaints, realizing that our role as global Leviathan does not excuse us from responding to the demands of globalization’s stakeholders, to include civilized compensation for all losses incurred. We don’t pretend such efforts repay all sacrifices endured; we simply believe in demonstrating that all lives have value. In sum, we won’t use force unless certain conditions are clearly met, and when we do, we’ll offer complete transparency regarding its employment—as in, every round fired.
Moving on to globalization’s vast array of networks: If you allow us to enter your networks, achieving the transparency we think is necessary to keep our people safe, we will grant you “fast-pass” access to our networks—without bias. If you can’t afford such network connections, we will endeavor to provide them to you at the lowest possible cost you can bear. We recognize your fears of falling behind as globalization surges forward, and we want to make clear from the start that we want you to become as connected as you can currently manage.
Finally, on the most personal questions of identity: If you can find your way to allowing freedom of religion in your country, we will do our best to reciprocate regarding any demands you may have for cultural separatism. While we don’t believe that such separatism is good or healthy, because it tends to prejudge the talents and ambitions of those we fear are trapped within its walls, we believe in
voluntary associations—even those that won’t have us as members. But we know this: Humanity’s paths to happiness are as varied as the human condition. While some of us may applaud your achievement of a strict social rule set in this regard, none of us will countenance your unreasonable desire to impose those strict rules unwillingly on others. If you can accept that while your definition of God’s law may be forever, humanity’s need for rule of law is persistent, then we’re willing to let you carve out an enclave within our global society.
America doesn’t pretend to have all the answers regarding this historical integration process we now call globalization. We do, however, want you to recognize that we inhabit the longest-running experiment of states and nationalities and religions uniting in the common cause of individual freedom, collective security, and economic prosperity. We understand that our model does not constitute the universe of possibilities even as we seek to universalize those possibilities.
Coda
THE FUTURE PERFECT TENSE
The future does have a way of happening.
As much as man is inclined to believe that his end time is the end time, it is not. And it has been thus since the beginning of time. Further to that, our present would have been as implausible to our forebears as the events and innovations of the next decades would be to us today. But while the future is inexorable, many of the twenty-first century’s most important outcomes will be determined largely by the choices we make over the next dozen years.
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