Fareed Zakaria, the Newsweek international editor and generally interesting and thoughtful commentator on world affairs--previous editor of Foreign Affairs, among other posts, is blogging this week on Josh Marshal's TPM Cafe blog. He is opening a conversation on his new book, The Post American World. Other equally interesting commentators will follow.
Well worth a read.
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We're Living in Scarily Peaceful Times
By Fareed Zakaria - May 5, 2008, 9:59AM
I wrote this book for many reasons and it has many themes. But one of them - that I'd like to start with today - is about nature of the world out there. What is the international system in which the United States currently exists? How dangerous is it? Why? Those questions are in some ways fundamental to our understanding of American foreign policy. In my book, I take the unconventional view that we're living in a remarkably benign international environment.
We have done a great job of scaring the hell out of people, telling them that they are living in frightening times. You know the list: terrorism, rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russian, an expansionist China. Throw into this mix suspicions of Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration and it seems as if the world is ganging up on the United States. In fact, the data overwhelmingly shows that we're living in more peaceful times than at any point since the early 1950s, and perhaps in several centuries. (Harvard's Steven Pinker says, "the most peaceful times in the species' existence.") Wars, civil wars, deaths are all down, down, down over the last twenty years. And economic growth is up across the globe.
The fear of terrorism and the rise of the "Homeland Security State" has been much remarked upon by now. But even as evidence piles on that the terror groups we huddle in fear of are actually quite small, dysfunctional and unpopular - it doesn't change out basic policies. And while this whole phenomenon is largely a product of the right - that have decided to scare us all because that helps elect "tough guys" -- the left sometimes beats a similar drum for different reasons. To argue that the Bush administration has been incompetent, it argues that we're all much less safe than before. (Of course, the right is far more guilty of fear-mongering- remember Rudy Giuliani on the campaign trail?)
The new and most dangerous twist to all this is that our great looming danger is Russia, China, and the rising oil dictatorships. McCain's rhetoric, which almost invites a new Cold War, and some of his most absurd proposals buy this dyspeptic view - expel Russia from the G-8 and permanently exclude China. This is a worldview bereft of any historical perspective. Compared with any previous era, there is more economic integration and even comity among the world's major powers. The imbalance between the West and the rest is large, not complete but large and in most areas increasing. The newly emerging states want to grow within the existing world order, which John Ikenberry has nicely described as "easy to join and hard to overturn." The world is going our way, slowly and fitfully, with some detours. No great power has an alternative model of modern life that has any real attraction?
The result: we magnify small differences. We define deviancy down, so that any expression of national pride or interest by Russia or China becomes evidence of inevitable great power conflict. (Note: I fully accept that we may have to disagree and contest some of these definitions of national interest but isn't this normal international politics? Don't we have to do this with the French every month?) Are we expecting that countries will accept every definition of order, interest, and values that we propose - and if not, it is aggression that must be combated? My fear is that the United States continues to have a maximalist view of international security - which sees any deviation from what we want - as evidence of evil. Rising powers will almost by definition not be willing to accept all our terms. Our reaction to them then contributes to international tension and great power hostility. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world does become more dangerous.
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