U.S. #1 in Cumulative Carbon Emissions

This is why the developing countries are unhappy about U.S. insistence that they cut THEIR carbon emissions!.



See scientist James Hansen's Newsweek article on "Power Failure: Politicians Are Fiddling While the Planet Burns" where he writes that "Planet earth is in imminent peril." We now have evidence, he continues "that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself--and the timetable is shorter than we thought."

While Hansen supported the election of Barack Obama, he now believes that in terms of climate change, "President Obama does not get it" and that he and his advisers have caved to pressure from monied interests.

"Civil resistance may be our best hope," he concludes.

Dialogue and Forum on "The End of the American Century"

An extended "dialogue" on the themes of The End of the American Century has been posted on the website of the China-U.S. Friendship Exchange at this link. The interview with me was conducted by the organization's founder and president, Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang, who is based in Hong Kong. The interview focuses especially on America's changing global role and its relationship with China.

This November issue of the China-U.S. Friendship blog also includes two other essays on themes related to my book: "American Power in the 21st Century" by Harvard's Joseph Nye (author of Soft Power); and "Peace, Not War, the Best Strategy," by Professor of Geopolitics Madhav Das Nalapat at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India. Those two essays are accessible at this link.

My responses to those two essays will appear in the next (December) issue of China-U.S. Friendship.com.

Can America Fail?

In its spring 2009 issue, The Wilson Quarterly featured a series of articles entitled "Decline or Renewal?" addressing the "scenarios for postcrisis America." The lead article, "Can America Fail?" was written by Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore, and the author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2009). The subtitle of that article is "A sympathetic critic issues a wake-up call for an America mired in groupthink and blind to its own shortcomings" which, in my mind, is also a pretty accurate description of yours truly!

Mahbubani believes that the U.S. has been "engulfed by a culture of individual irresponsibility" and sees many of the country's policies as deeply injurious to the rest of the world. Our policies on the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq, our double standard on nuclear proliferation, and our policies (or lack of them) on global warming "have injured the 6.5 billion other people who inhabit the world." Mahbubani thinks Americans need to be able to see our country the way others see us, to recognize and address our own shortcomings, and to be prepared to work harder, consumer less, and--especially--to sacrifice.

The two other essays in the Wilson Quarterly are a counterpoint to Mahbubani's article, but also illustrate exactly the problem Mahbubani addresses: Americans "mired in groupthink" and blind to their own shortcomings. The article by Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, asserts (without any evidence provided) that "today, the rest of the world is looking to the United States to pull it out of a recession." He also asserts, astoundingly, that the current financial crisis "has underscored the continuing strength of American global influence." Equally questionable, and more fodder for Mahbubani's observations, is Arthur Herman's assertion that "America is still the most innovative and creative economy in the world."

The editors of The Wilson Quarterly invited me to submit a response to these three articles, and a version of the following appeared in their "Letters" section in the Summer 2009 issue (page 6).

.............................
On the question of U.S. decline, Kishore Mahbubani hits the nail on the head by pointing to the inability of American thinkers and policy-makers “to listen to other voices on the planet.” Indeed, his point is illustrated by the contributions by others in the same issue who seem to assume that other countries want the U.S. to lead and who believe that the American economy is still the most dynamic in the world.

If one simply asks other people in the world what they think, these casual assumptions wither away. Global opinion surveys conducted by Pew, BBC and others show little enthusiasm in other countries for “American-style democracy,” for American ways of doing business, or for the spread of U.S. ideas and customs. Though global opinion about the U.S. has improved somewhat with the election of President Obama, far more people worldwide continue to see U.S. influence on the world as “mostly negative” rather than “mostly positive.” On this scale, among 15 countries, the U.S. ranks 10th, below Germany, Britain, Japan and China, according to a recent BBC poll.

It is difficult to see how the U.S. economy could be seen as so vital, innovative and creative at a time when the core parts of it are collapsing under the weight of innovative stagnation and stupefying levels of incompetence, greed, corruption. Manufacturing has steadily declined as a component of GDP, replaced increasingly by financial services. The U.S. does not actually produce much any more. Now the financial sector has proven a hollow shell, after fostering and encouraging record levels of both consumer spending and debt. This can no longer be sustained, so the U.S. economy is bound to decline, and probably by a lot. As Professor Mahbubani astutely points out, “the time has come for Americans to spend less and work harder.”

Global Views of US Improve, But Still Negative

A BBC poll of citizens of 21 countries shows that the global image of the U.S. has improved slightly in the last year, but is still largely negative. Far more countries (12) have predominantly negative views of the U.S. than have predominantly positive views (6). On average, across all countries, positive views of the U.S. have increased over the last year from 35% to 40%, but those are still outweighed by the negative views (43%, down from 47%). Respondents in each country were asked if they felt "the following countries are having a mainly positive or mainly negative influence on the world."

Negative feelings about U.S. influence were particularly strong among America's closest neighbors and allies. In the UK, 45% thought U.S. influence was mostly negative; France, 53%; Mexico 54%; Canada 55%; Spain 56%; and Germany 65%. In a ranking of all the countries in the survey, Germany was viewed as having the most positive influence, whereas the U.S. ranked 10th on the list, just below China.

Another BBC poll of 17 countries showed an overwhelming majority--67%--believing that the election of President Obama "will lead to improved relations between the United States and the rest of the world."

These polls were conducted between November 21, 2008 and February 1, 2009.

The BBC polls confirm that there has been some softening of global views about the U.S., at least partially due to President Obama. But they also reveal the persistence, depth and breadth of animosity to the U.S., and how far the U.S. has to go to recover from the damage to the country's reputation. As I suggested in The End of the American Century, the decline of the U.S. and its reputation was deep-seated, and preceded the Bush administration. George W. Bush made things far worse, but new leadership in D.C.--even a very positive influence like Barack Obama--can not easily or quickly restore America's reputation, or its global leadership.

How Torture Hurts and Weakens the U.S.

Mark Danner is our contemporary Diogenes, searching (often vainly) for the honest man and using dogged empiricism to establish the truth. His focus in recent years has been on the U.S. use of torture and his latest report, in the New York Review of Books, is "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means."

As a followup to my recent post on the Spanish court considering criminal charges against U.S. officials for the justification and use of torture, I offer these two quotations about the effects of U.S. torture on our values and our security.

The first is from President Obama, in an interview on 60 Minutes:

I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantánamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against US interests all around the world.... The whole premise of Guantánamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.... Are we going to just keep on going until the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that’s really going to make us safer?

And Danner's response to Obama's sentiments:

This is as clear and concise a summary of the damage wrought by torture as one is likely to get. Torture has undermined the United States’ reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo.

Fukuyama: From "The End of History" to "The Fall of America"

Francis Fukuyama, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (my own alma mater), had a high profile essay in Newsweek in October, boldly titled “The Fall of America, Inc.” Professor Fukuyama addresses the declining global appeal of America’s “brand.” Two “fundamentally American ideas have dominated global thinking since the early 1980s,” he contends. The first of these was “a certain vision of capitalism” accompanied by “pared-back government.” The second idea was “America as a promoter of liberal democracy around the world.”

Fukuyama sees both of these ideas now tarnished and discredited. The U.S. economy “has gone off the rails and threatens to drag the rest of the world down with it. Even worse,

“the culprit is the American model itself: under the mantra of less government, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector, and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of society.”

The idea of American democracy was “tarnished even earlier,” with the freedom agenda of the Iraq War widely perceived around the world as “an excuse for furthering U.S. hegemony.”

In my book The End of the American Century, I make similar arguments about the decline of brand U.S, but I show that this decline started long before the recent financial collapse, and even before the Iraq War. Global public opinion surveys in recent years have shown little enthusiasm for “American-style democracy” and even less support for the American ways of doing business. And while Fukuyama uses the term “brand” as a metaphor, there actually have been marketing surveys of the popularity of “nation brands” among consumers around the world. In one such study, the United States ranked eleventh out of twenty-five countries.

Fukuyama’s Newsweek essay is interesting both for its perceptive insights, but also because of who he is and what he has written and argued in the past. He gained national prominence in 1989 with the publication of an influential and controversial article titled “The End of History?” In that essay, and a following book, he argued that the collapse of European communism and the end of the Cold War marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Later he became a key figure in the neoconservative movement and its Project for the New American Century which, among other initiatives, strongly encouraged the removal from power of Saddam Hussein, even before September 11. By 2002, though, he had turned away from the neoconservatives, and became critical of the Bush administration and the Iraq War.

Much has changed in the world since the Western triumphalism following the collapse of communism. It has become painfully clear, for one, that many people around the world—perhaps even most people—are not so convinced that Western liberal democracy is—or should be—“the final form of human government.” Even so, it is quite startling to see one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement so frankly recognizing the failure of the American model to take hold in the rest of the world. As Fukuyama concludes his essay,

“the ultimate test for the American model will be its capacity to reinvent itself once again. Good branding is not, to quote a presidential candidate, a matter of putting lipstick on a pig. It’s about having the right product to sell in the first place. American democracy has its work cut out for it.”

America Loses Global Economic Leadership

Over the last decade, the U.S. has lost political, military and international influence in the world; now it has lost its economic clout as well. The collapse of the financial system in the United States, the very linchpin of both the American and global economies, has evoked comments of gleeful retribution from some countries, and worrisome concern from others. But everywhere, now, there is a recognition that the U.S. economy is weak and vulnerable, and hardly a model for emulation by others. The collapse of this final pillar of U.S. global leadership is also encouraging other countries to assume a more assertive role.

Some of the sharpest criticism, and even sarcasm, came from the usual suspects. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez mocked Lehman Brothers

“They were always producing negative reports about Venezuela. . . .They forgot about themselves ... and 'boom!' they were bankrupt." (Toronto Star, 9/16/08)

and then skipped the opening of the UN General Assembly to visit China instead, saying that Beijing was now much more relevant than New York.

At a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that

“the big powers are going down. . . .They have come to the end of their power, and the world is on the verge of entering a new promising era.” (NYT 7/30/08).

But even more moderate leaders have echoed such sentiments. The president of Argentina, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner declared that

“We are witnessing the First World, which at one point had been painted as a mecca we should strive to reach, popping like a bubble.” (NYT 10/3/08)

In Latin America, according to the New York Times (10/3/08), governments “have been working for the past decade to reduce their dependence on the American economy,” have “diversified trade with the rest of the world,” and have set aside funds “for times when international conditions turn sour.”

In Moscow, both former President (now Premier) Putin and his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, have been flexing Russia’s diplomatic and military muscles for several years. The Kremlin has repeatedly rejected U.S. global dominance in a “unipolar” world, and with its landmark conflict with Georgia in August, asserted its own “privileged” sphere of influence in the world, “just like other countries in the world.”(NYT 8/31/08). With the U.S. economic crisis, Medvedev, like Kirchner, has called into question even U.S. economic leadership. He asserted last week that U.S. global economic leadership was drawing to a close. “The times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good.” (NYT 10/3/08).

While the U.S. financial crisis has accelerated these moves away from the U.S. economy, the trend had begun years before, and is an integral part of the decline of U.S global influence more generally. Surveys in recent years by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found surprisingly little support in other countries for “the American ways of doing business.” Antipathy to the U.S. business model is particularly widespread and strong in Latin America and western Europe. In the 2007 Pew survey, in only a third of the 46 countries surveyed did a majority of respondents like the American ways of doing business. Most of those were in Africa.

For most of the postwar era, the United States has been both a political and economic model for countries and peoples around the world. This began to wane in recent years, especially in the face of the belligerent and unilateralist policies of the Bush administration. The financial collapse of the U.S. is one more nail in the coffin of U.S. supremacy and global dominance.

U.S. Intelligence Predicts Reduced U.S. Dominance

A Washington Post article this week (9/10/08) reports on a forthcoming U.S. intelligence agencies report that “envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades.” Thomas Finger, a top analyst for the U.S. intelligence community, delivered the preview in a speech in which he saw U.S. global leadership rapidly eroding in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.” The one area of continued U.S. dominance—military power—was becoming increasingly irrelevant as an asset in global power and influence.

These are all themes of The End of the American Century, so should not be terribly surprising, except for the source—the U.S. government itself—and the sweep of the conclusions. It is not just U.S. diplomatic influence that is on the wane, but political, economic, cultural and military leadership as well. The multidimensional and interrelated aspects of U.S. decline are the central theme of my book, but it is startling to hear it expressed so bluntly from the top intelligence analysts of the federal government.

The intelligence report, however, misses a key element of the declining global influence of the U.S.: its domestic weakening. Fingar’s speech saw the decline in U.S. dominance coming from exclusively global trends: globalization, climate change, resource shortages. All of these are important, of course, but the root of America’s declining global influence is here at home. Just as at the global level, the domestic decay is multidimensional—it is political, social and (especially) economic; and affects education, health care, infrastructure, and competitiveness.

The United States has become the world’s largest debtor, and the governments of other countries are increasingly worried about the scope and scale of U.S. debt and fiscal weaknesses. Even the International Monetary Fund, normally concerned about debt and insolvency in Third World countries, has warned that the continuing large budget deficits of the U.S pose “a significant threat for the rest of the world.” Other countries are beginning to turn away from the United States, both for investments and for global economic leadership, and are increasingly abandoning the dollar as the favored international currency. This is one reason for the sharp and steady decline of the dollar compared to the euro and other international currencies.

In many other respects, as well, the United States is no longer seen as the standard for emulation by other countries. The U.S. has among the highest rates of both poverty and inequality in the developed world. This poverty and inequality contribute to highly uneven access to health care, so the U.S. ranks near the bottom of developed countries in most measures of health and medical care. Even our vaunted democracy, the “beacon on the hill” for centuries, is now so dominated by money and special interests that it is rarely cited by other countries as a model for political development. Global public opinion polls in the past showed foreign populations skeptical and wary of the U.S. government; increasingly now they reveal negativity toward the U.S. population, and even to U.S. ideals. All aspects of American “soft power” are withering away.

The Fingar report, like Fareed Zakaria’s new book The Post-American World, sees this global shift coming because of “the rise of the rest”—global powerhouses like China, India and Brazil that increasingly cut into the U.S. lead on the world stage. Zakaria asserts, indeed, that the shift is not about the decline of America, and writes about the many elements of this country’s continuing strength. Solidly within the U.S. establishment, both of these analyses ignore the sand shifting beneath their own feet. Only by confronting and addressing our own domestic weaknesses and problems can we begin to solve our international ones.