The New Walls of Baghdad

The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.

Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.

While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.

While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:

Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.

The Israeli Laboratory

The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.

Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.

Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.

This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.

The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.

The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics

This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Black-hawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state of the art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay.''

The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.

But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),

One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers — again, in secret — when full-field operations begin.
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis — to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."

According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are — we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."

The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style

The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.

As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.

But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.

First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy — what he termed "disengagement" — as a new way to "shift the narrative."

This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.

Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.

Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.

Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.

Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.

Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.

The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq

Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation.
One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.

Militarily, the French army did not lose — they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.

Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."

Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.

Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia

By STEVE NIVA

Un popolo camaleontico

Il carro dei vincitori non riesce ad accogliere tutti i "saltatori". Immagini e pensieri che ritornano a luglio 2006 dove la nazionale di calcio conquistò la vetta più elevata. A roma non bastarono pullman scoperti per contenere tutta la folla. Adesso, è lo stesso caso. Un popolo che per forza o debolezza si adatta alla situazione vincente del caso. E' un bene o un male? Penso che non sia nè l'uno, nè l'altro è il DNA.

Spiaceva quasi, l’altroieri, sentire l’intera piazza San Carlo che sfanculava ogni dieci minuti Johnny Raiotta, il direttore del Tg1 che fa rimpiangere Mimun. Troppi vaffa per un solo ometto. Poi però uno rincasava, cercava il servizio del Tg1 di mezza sera su una manifestazione criticabilissima come tutte, ma imponente, che in un giorno ha raccolto 500mila firme per tre referendum. Invece, sorpresa (si fa per dire): nessun servizio, nessuna notizia, nemmeno una parola.

Molti e giusti servizi sul 25 aprile dei politici, sulle elezioni a Roma, sul caro-prezzi, sul ragazzino annegato, poi largo spazio alle due vere notizie del giorno: le torte in faccia al direttore del New York Times e la mostra riminese su Romolo e Remo (anzi, per dirla col novello premier, Remolo). Seguiva un pallosissimo Tv7 con lo stesso Raiotta, Tremonti, la Bonino e Mieli che discutevano per ore e ore di nonsisabenechecosa. Raiotta indossava eccezionalmente...

una giacca, forse per riguardo verso il direttore del Corriere. Questo sì che è servizio pubblico. Così, nel tentativo maldestro di contrastare - oscurandolo - il V-Day sull’informazione, Johnny Raiotta del Kansas City ne confermava e rafforzava le ragioni.

E anche i giornali di ieri facevano a gara nel dimostrare che Grillo, anche quando esagera, non esagera mai abbastanza. Il Giornale della ditta, giustamente allarmato dal referendum per cancellare la legge Gasparri, sguinzaglia per il terzo giorno consecutivo un piccolo sicario con le mèches in una strepitosa inchiesta a puntate: “La vera vita di Grillo”. Finora il segugio ossigenato ha scoperto, nell’ordine, che Grillo: da giovane andava a letto con ragazze; alcuni suoi amici, invidiosi, parlano male di lui; la sua villa a Genova consuma energia elettrica; ha avuto un tragico incidente stradale; è genovese e dunque tirchio (fosse nato ad Ankara, fumerebbe come un turco); nel suo orto ha sistemato una melanzana di plastica; ha avuto un figlio “nato purtroppo con dei problemi motori” (il giornalista è un cultore della privacy); e, quando fa spettacoli a pagamento, pretende addirittura di essere pagato. Insomma, un delinquente. E siamo solo alla terza puntata: chissà quali altri delitti il Pulitzer arcoriano - già difensore di Craxi, Berlusconi, Dell’Utri e Mangano - scoprirà a carico di Grillo.

Nell’attesa, il Giornale ha mandato al V2-Day un inviato di punta, Tony Damascelli. Il quale, mentre il Cainano riceve il camerata Ciarrapico, paragona Grillo a Mussolini chiamandolo Benito e poi si duole perché piazza San Carlo ha applaudito a lungo Montanelli (fondatore del Giornale quand’era una cosa seria) e Biagi, definito graziosamente “il grande disoccupato”. La scelta di inviare Damascelli non è casuale, trattandosi di un giornalista sospeso dall’Ordine dei Giornalisti perché spiava un collega del suo stesso quotidiano, Franco Ordine, spifferando in anteprima quel che scriveva all’amico Moggi. Siccome l’Ordine non è una cosa seria, lo spione non fu cacciato, ma solo sospeso per 4 mesi. E siccome Il Giornale non è (più) una cosa seria, anziché licenziarlo l’ha spostato in cronaca. E l’ha mandato al V-Day che aveva di mira, fra l’altro, l’Ordine dei Giornalisti. Geniale.

Il Foglio, per dimostrare l’ottima salute di cui gode l’informazione, pubblicava proprio ieri un articolo di Roberto Ciuni, ex P2. Ma, oltre ai giornalisti-cimice, abbiamo pure i giornalisti-medium. Quelli che non han bisogno di assistere a un fatto per raccontarlo: prescindono dal fattore spazio-temporale. Il Riformista, alla vigilia del V-Day, già sapeva che sarebbe stata una manifestazione terroristica, “con minacce in stile Br ai giornalisti servi” (“Le Grillate rosse”). Ecco chi erano i 100 mila in piazza San Carlo: brigatisti. Francesco Merlo se ne sta addirittura a Parigi: di lì, armato di un telescopio potentissimo, riesce a vedere e a spiegare agli italiani quel che accade in Italia. Ieri ha scritto su Repubblica che “in Italia c’è sovrapproduzione di informazione” (testuale): ce ne vorrebbe un po’ meno, ecco.

Quanto a Grillo, è “in crisi” (2 milioni di persone in 45 piazze) e “non riesce a far ridere” (strano: ridevano tutti). Poi, citando Alberoni (mica uno qualsiasi: Alberoni), ha sostenuto che “in piazza c’erano umori che non s’identificano con Grillo”. Ecco, Merlo è così bravo che, appollaiato tra Montmartre e gli Champs Elysées, riesce a penetrare la mente e gli umori dei cittadini in piazza a Torino, Milano, Bologna, Roma. E spiega loro che cosa effettivamente pensano. Più che un giornalista, un paragnosta. Finchè potrà contare su fenomeni così, l’informazione in Italia è salva. Di che si lamentano, allora, Grillo e gli italiani?

fonte:by voglioscendere

Is there a secret world government?

The Committee of Three Hundred

Many people no longer believe that presidents, premier ministers and other "visible" officials rule their countries. Instead, they suspect that the real authority – one that is powerful, unwavering and secret – is concentrated in the hands of others. Like the masons for example. The truly paranoid have devised the so-called "International Conspiracy Theory," which tells how a handful of wealthy, highly positioned individuals rule the world. This group of decision-makers launches wars, invents deadly diseases and pumps the population full of narcotics, alcohol and pornography to get rid of the world's dead weight. Consequently, a population of 1 billion select individuals will someday remain. They will freely enjoy the blessings of nature – clean air, freshwater and natural food.

It seems ludicrous, but recently a British intelligence officer from M16 has asserted that this secret international organization does exist in his book, "The Conspirators Hierarchy: The Committee of Three Hundred."
"During my career as an officer in British intelligence," Coleman writes, "I received access to strictly confidential documents on numerous occasions. Their contents were unexpectedly straightforward. I learned that there are powers that control the governments of many nations. I was taken aback and decided to inform a world living in ignorance. Imagine a powerful group that doesn't recognize any national borders that is involved in the financial, insurance, coal-mining, pharmaceutical and oil industries -- whose members only answer to the group. This is the ‘Committee of Three Hundred,' an elite group that has ruled the world from 1897. Its backbone today is the world's 300 most influential people."

Powerful conspirators

Coleman writes that secret organizations and think tanks work for the Committee of Three Hundred. A list of these institutions follows.
As of 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has consisted of the most influential individuals in the U.S. and Western world, ranging from current and previous presidents to CIA officials. The CFR was established by the American banker J.P. Morgan, and controls the U.S. Federal Reserve system, New York Stock Exchange and leading mass media.
In 1954, the Bilderberg Group held its original conference uniting the American and European elite. (The organization was named after the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek in the Netherlands where the meeting took place.)
In 1973, a third influential structure came into being – the Trilateral Commission – consisting of representatives from the U.S., Europe and Japan. The organization's goal is to "create a mechanism of global planning and long-term repartition of resources."
Since 1968, the Club of Rome has been one of the most important foreign affairs divisions of the Committee of Three Hundred. The organization unites scholars, globalists, futurists and internationalists of various suites. The organization has its own private intelligence agencies and "borrows" information from Interpol, the FSB and Mossad.

The millionaire executive David Rockefeller controls the activities of these organizations.
A short list of periphery organizations lending assistance to these four intelligence giants are: Round Table, David Millner Group, Order of St John, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, The China Fund, Inc., Fabian Society, Black Nobility, Mont Pelerin Society, Hellfire Club and the Masons.
The mother of all international think thanks and research institutions is the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which is beginning to help the Stanford Research Institute.
Coleman writes that past and present members of the Committee of Three Hundred include the Queen of England, the Queen of the Netherlands, the Queen of Denmark, European royal families, George Bush, Edward Carter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Francois Mitterrand, Jean Monet, Ernest Oppenheimer and his heir Henry.
In the mid-1990s, Russia was invited to participate in establishing a single world state.
"Boris Yeltsin adhered to the decrees of the Committee of Three Hundred in an experiment to bind Russia to the will of the ruling elite," writes Coleman.

Heap of plans

Coleman describes the new world order as seen by the Committee of Three Hundred.
Leaders: There will be a single world state and monetary system ruled by unelected oligarchs and their royal lineage, who will appoint leaders from their own ranks in a feudal system as existed in the Middle Ages.
Religion: Only one religion will be permitted in the form of a state church. The church has existed secretly since 1920. All Christian churches will be prohibited.
Control: All individuals will have an identification number. The numbers will be entered into a composite file at NATO in Brussels together with details dossiers.

Family: Marriages will be canceled. Children will be taken from their parents at an early age. They will be raised at special institutions like state property. Free sex will be compulsory.
Children: If a woman gets pregnant after having two children, she will be immediately sent for an abortion and sterilization.
Resources: Only members of the Committee of Three Hundred and select individuals will have the right to make use of natural resources. Agriculture will be completely controlled by the Committee of Three Hundred, and food processing will be strictly controlled.
Social Policy: At least 4 billion "useless individuals" will be exterminated by 2050 as a result of territorial wars, organized deadly epidemics, quickly spreading diseases and hunger. Electrical energy, food and water will sufficiently provide for the white population of Western Europe and North America and only later different races. The populations of Canada, Western Europe and the U.S. will decrease more quickly than on other continents until the population reaches the controllable level of 1 billion. Of these individuals, 500 million will be Chinese and Japanese, who will be "chosen" as they have been subject to strict regulations and unquestioningly obeying authorities for centuries.

Current situation

Coleman asserts that individuals who are party to the single world state are strenuously brainwashing the population, rewriting history, creating ideal individuals and working to decrease the population.
Profiling is a method developed in 1922 by an order of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. The method was based on principles similar to today's NLP, which helps to influence people's ideas and decisions. The method was used by Major John Riz, British military specialist, on 80,000 "guinea pigs" from the British Army and prisoners of war, who were subjected to many types of psychological testing. Later, a special brainwashing center for the civil population was established at the University of Sussex. This super-secret organization was called the Institute of Scientific Politics.
The Rockefeller Fund subsidized scholarly work to create an ideal history after the end of World War II, when Anglo-American troops naturally came out the winners.
The Rockefeller Fund is also sponsoring genetic maps of the qualities of the ideal human in closed laboratories on the basis of the genome to grow test-tube geniuses and docile invincible soldiers.
A program regulating the growth of the population was approved at a conference of the world state. Its main goal is to ensure a low birth level in countries outside Western civilization. The program covers 100 countries and utilizes measures such as the forced sterilization of men and women.

Military Officer's Opinion

Vladimir Nikiforov, former KGB colonel, senior officer of the First Division of the Fifth Department of the Committee of Foreign Economic Relations, says the Masons have bought everything.
"In the 1980s, I was a supervisor in Southeastern Asia. I worked in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and China. Of course, I met with my colleagues from intelligence agencies and worked with the states of these nations. And on numerous occasions I was told about the existence of a world state in personal conversations. All presidents resist its dictatorship, but they know that they have long been puppets of this ruling system composing only 2 percent of the world's population – the richest individuals. I know for sure that the Queen of England and King of Spain and his wife are members. This so-called world state bought everything. They wage wars under the pretense of huge state interests and safety and invent artificial diseases such as the Bird Flu to control people and get rid of human dead weight. As a result, as I've been told, this secret world state will create a controllable mass. The center of the organization is in New York on Fifth Avenue in a large temple not far from where the twin towers were destroyed in 2001. They meet there from time to time."

by Svetlana Kuzina

La Trilaterale: i manager del nuovo ordine mondiale

Mentre i media, riparlano di stupri e veline, qualcuno si organizza per far saltare in banco. Naturalmente è tutto legale, come se per legge si vuole imporre un pensiero o un modo di agire. Non è dittatura, è persuasione che attraversa le menti, diciamo virtuale per non dire occulta.

Le riunioni del G8 o quelle del World Economic Forum di Davos sono oggetto di grande attenzione da parte dei mass media e dei movimenti no-global.

Quelle della Commissione Trilaterale, assai più importanti per le sorti del mondo, avvengono invece nel silenzio mediatico più totale. Nessuno se ne accorge, nessuno ne parla, nessuno protesta contro questo organo privato di concertazione e orientamento della politica mondiale che riunisce l’élite politico-economica di Stati Uniti, Europa e Giappone (da cui il nome): duecento tra capi di Stato e di governo, ministri, grandi banchieri, manager delle più grandi multinazionali, economisti, militari si riuniscono ogni anno per quattro giorni in una città della triade, per decidere a porte chiuse le linee guida di politica internazionale ed economica che i singoli governi devono poi seguire.

Quest’anno la riunione si tiene a Washington. I lavori, iniziati venerdì, si concludono oggi.

Il governo mondiale dei ‘migliori’. La Commissione Trilaterale è stata fondata nel 1973 dall’attuale presidente onorario dell’organizzazione, David Rockefeller, patriarca della potente dinastia bancaria e convinto ‘mondialista’, assieme a Zbigniew Brzezinski, uno dei principali architetti della guerra al terrorismo post-11 settembre, oggi consigliere di Barak Obama.

La stampa statunitense dell’epoca definì la Tilaterale una “filiazione diretta” del Gruppo Bilderberg, società segreta internazionale di cui condivide membri e ideologia: quella di un ordine mondiale gestito da una ristretta aristocrazia economico-politica soprannazionale.

Scrive il filosofo e sociologo francese Gilbert Larochelle, “la cittadella trilaterale è un luogo protetto dove i ‘migliori’, nella loro ispirata superiorità, elaborano criteri per poi inviarli verso il basso”.

Una sorta di massoneria internazionale. La Trilaterale non è un’organizzazione segreta, ma è caratterizzata dalla riservatezza tipica delle organizzazioni massoniche.

Ha un sito web molto discreto dove si trovano luoghi e date delle riunioni e dove si possono ordinare i ‘Trialoghi’, gli atti pubblici di quelle riunioni – che però, lo ricordiamo, si svolgono a porte chiuse, quindi non è detto che venga pubblicato proprio tutto.

La maggiore riservatezza riguarda i suoi membri: le liste aggiornate dei partecipanti sono pubbliche solo in teoria: noi l’abbiamo richiesta tempo fa, senza avere risposta.

Linee guida per la politica mondiale. Dai Trialoghi pubblicati finora emerge che nelle riunioni della Trilaterale si prendono decisioni ‘quadro’ in materia di globalizzazione dei mercati, politica energetica, finanza internazionale, liberalizzazione delle economie. Ma si discute anche crisi internazionali e guerre, gestione del dissenso e limitazione degli “eccessi della democrazia”. Il tema dipende dalle contingenze storiche.

Ad esempio, dopo gli attentati dell’11 settembre, la riunione annuale del 2002 fu dominata da Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell e Alan Greenspan che sollecitavano una “risposta globale” al terrorismo che vedesse impegnati tutti i Paesi occidentali sotto la guida degli Stati Uniti.

I saggi illuminati. Politica estera e militare, economica, finanziaria e sociale di ogni governo devono seguire le direttive imposte da questi ‘esperti’.

Su Le Monde Diplomatique del novembre 2003, l’autore di un articolo sulla Commissione Trilaterale – il professore Olivier Boiral – scriveva: “Come i re filosofi della città platonica, che contemplavano il mondo delle idee per infondere la loro trascendente saggezza nella gestione degli affari terrestri, l’élite che si riunisce all’interno di questa istituzione molto poco democratica si adopera nel definire i criteri di un ‘buon governo’ internazionale. Veicola un ideale platonico di ordine e controllo, assicurato da una classe privilegiata di tecnocrati che mette la propria competenza e la propria esperienza al di sopra delle profane rivendicazioni dei semplici cittadini”.

di Enrico Piovesana

Parole giuste e parole ingiuste

Il potere delle parole. Chi pubblica le parole pensa di essere Parola. Ma chi pubblica falsità come sarà tranquillo con la sua coscienza. E, chi non pubblica sapendo che certi fatti non devono essere pubblicato sono schiavi o servi del Destino? Ci sono parole e parole. Ci sono parole usate per raccontare fatti e parole usate per orientare consensi, elettorali e non. Parole trasparenti e parole oscure. Parole che vogliamo definire, con un’espressione forse non corretta ma che ci piace, “giuste” e “ingiuste”. Spesso i giornalisti, che con le parole lavorano, complici del potere o dei poteri, usano le seconde, quelle ingiuste; talora ne inventano di sana pianta così da creare polveroni che mascherino o nascondano del tutto la verità. E non parlo solo di silenzi, censure, falsità, imbrogli belli e buoni che quasi sempre raggiungono lettori ignari sotto forma di interi articoli. Parlo proprio di parole, di semplici brevi parole, coniate dalla cattiva politica e adottate dalla cattiva stampa, nella migliore dell’ipotesi per pigrizia, nella peggiore per complice disonestà. Vi ricordate di... Bettino Craxi, tangentista della prima ora che per sfuggire al processo, scappò in Tunisia dove visse finché il diabete glielo permise, nella sua bellissima villa sul mare? Uno che scappa per non subire condanne o comunque per non incappare nelle maglie della giustizia, secondo la lingua italiana, la logica e la coscienza, è un “latitante”. Ebbene la stampa ne ha fatto un “esule”. E che dire della guerra preventiva? Invenzione del governo americano per giustificare un’aggressione sulla base di una presunzione di colpevolezza creata ad hoc, che gli irakeni – i magazzini stipati di armi chimiche – stessero per sferrare un attacco micidiale contro l’Occidente. E talora le “guerre” diventano addirittura “missioni di pace”. Non basta. Ci sono altri ossimori della vergogna. Il fuoco amico, ad esempio, per addolcire la pillola dell’errore del commilitone. Amico il cavolo. La gente muore e mai nessuno è morto per amicizia. Ed anche le bombe intelligenti. Stupidi ordigni che seminano il terrore. E a proposito di terrore. L’Occidente bolla – e a ragione – come terroristi, estremisti e integralisti islamici che con l’esplosivo fanno saltare e si fanno saltare in aria. E’ chiaro che la definizione calza a pennello a chi semina morte con attentati. Perché terrore semina anche quando mette in gioco la sua stessa vita. Ma forse hanno seminato meno terrore, le atomiche su Hiroshima e Nagasaki? Le incursioni nei villaggi e i bombardamenti di napaln in Vietnam? Gli interventi della Cia per appoggiare o rovesciare governi? L’embargo per il quale sono stati negati presidi essenziali a popolazioni inermi? Le ultime guerre che hanno allineato dietro gli Usa altri i paesi dell’“Occidente civile” sono state spacciate come esportazioni di democrazia e difesa di libertà. Ma abbiamo visto il terrore negli occhi di donne e bambini. Peccato che nessun giornalista abbia definito terroristi i governi Usa. Ada Mollica

The Future of American Power

On June 22, 1897, about 400 million people around the world -- one-fourth of humanity -- got the day off. It was the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The 11 premiers of Britain's self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of 50,000 soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, and Gurkhas from Nepal. It was, as one historian wrote, "a Roman moment."

In London, eight-year-old Arnold Toynbee was perched on his uncle's shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that, watching the grandeur of the day, it felt as if the sun were "standing still in the midst of Heaven." "I remember the atmosphere," he wrote. "It was: 'Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.'"

But of course, history did happen to Britain. The question for the superpower of the current age is, Will history happen to the United States as well? Is it already happening? No analogy is exact, but the British Empire in its heyday is the closest any nation in the modern age has come to the United States' position today. In considering whether and how the forces of change will affect the United States, it is worth paying close attention to the experience of Britain.
There are many contemporary echoes. The United States' recent military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq all have parallels in British military interventions decades ago. The basic strategic dilemma of being the only truly global player on the world stage is strikingly similar. But there are also fundamental differences between Britain then and the United States now. For Britain, as it tried to maintain its superpower status, the largest challenge was economic rather than political. For the United States, it is the other way around.

Through shrewd strategic choices and some sophisticated diplomacy, Britain was able to maintain and even extend its influence for decades. In the end, however, it could not alter the fact that its power position -- its economic and technological dynamism -- was fast eroding. Britain declined gracefully -- but inexorably. The United States today faces a problem that is quite different. The U.S. economy (despite its current crisis) remains fundamentally vigorous when compared with others. American society is vibrant. It is the United States' political system that is dysfunctional, unable to make the relatively simple reforms that would place the country on extremely solid footing for the future. Washington seems largely unaware of the new world rising around it -- and shows few signs of being able to reorient U.S. policy for this new age.
BRITANNIA'S DEMISE

Today, it is difficult even to imagine the magnitude of the British Empire. At its height, it covered about a quarter of the earth's land surface and included a quarter of its population. London's network of colonies, territories, bases, and ports spanned the globe. The empire was protected by the Royal Navy, the greatest seafaring force in history, and linked by 170,000 nautical miles of ocean cables and 662,000 miles of aerial and buried cables. British ships had facilitated the development of the first global communications network, via the telegraph. Railways and canals (the Suez Canal most importantly) deepened the connectivity of the system. Through all of this, the British Empire created the first truly global market.

Americans often talk about the appeal of their culture and ideas, but "soft power" really began with Britain. The historian Claudio Véliz points out that in the seventeenth century, the two imperial powers of the day, Britain and Spain, both tried to export their ideas and practices to their western colonies. Spain wanted the Counter-Reformation to take hold in the New World; Britain wanted religious pluralism and capitalism to flourish. As it turned out, British ideas proved more universal. In fact, Britain has arguably been the most successful exporter of its culture in human history. Before the American dream, there was an "English way of life" -- one that was watched, admired, and copied throughout the world. And also thanks to the British Empire, English spread as a global language, spoken from the Caribbean to Cape Town to Calcutta.
Not all of this was recognized in June 1897, but much of it was. The British were hardly alone in making comparisons between their empire and Rome. Paris' Le Figaro declared that Rome itself had been "equaled, if not surpassed, by the Power which in Canada, Australia, India, in the China Seas, in Egypt, Central and Southern Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean rules the peoples and governs their interests." The Kreuz-Zeitung in Berlin described the empire as "practically unassailable." Across the Atlantic, The New York Times gushed, "We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet."

Britain's exalted position, however, was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when British power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours while losing only 48 soldiers of its own. Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was "the British Empire against 30,000 farmers."
The war was ostensibly fought for a virtuous reason: to defend the rights of the English-speaking people of the Boer republics, who were treated as second-class citizens by the ruling Boers. But it did not escape the attention of London that after the discovery of gold in the region in 1886, these republics had been producing a quarter of the world's gold supply. In any event, the Boers launched a preemptive strike, and war began in 1899.

Things went badly for Britain from the beginning. It had more men and better weapons and was fielding its best generals (including Lord Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman). But the Boers were passionate in defending themselves, knew the land, and adopted successful guerrilla tactics that relied on stealth and speed. The British army's enormous military superiority meant little on the ground, and its commanders resorted to brutal tactics -- burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world's first), sending in more and more troops. Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops fighting a militia of 45,000.

The Boers could not hold back the British army forever, and in 1902 they surrendered. But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war. It had suffered 45,000 casualties, spent half a billion pounds, stretched its army to the breaking point, and discovered enormous incompetence and corruption in its war effort. Its brutal wartime tactics, moreover, gave it a black eye in the view of the rest of the world. At home, all of this created, or exposed, deep divisions over Britain's global role. Abroad, every other great power -- France, Germany, the United States -- opposed London's actions. "They were friendless," the historian Lawrence James has written of the British in 1902.

Fast-forward to today. Another superpower, militarily unbeatable, wins an easy victory in Afghanistan and then takes on what it is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein's isolated regime in Iraq. The result: a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition. The analogy is obvious; the United States is Britain, the Iraq war is the Boer War -- and, by extension, the United States' future looks bleak. And indeed, regardless of the outcome in Iraq, the costs have been massive. The United States has been overextended and distracted, its army stressed, its image sullied. Rogue states such as Iran and Venezuela and great powers such as China and Russia are taking advantage of Washington's inattention and bad fortunes. The familiar theme of imperial decline is playing itself out one more time. History is happening again.
THE LONG GOODBYE

But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War, say some. If only it had stayed out of Africa, say others. The historian Niall Ferguson provocatively suggests that had Britain stayed out of World War I (and there might not have been a world war without British participation), it might have managed to preserve its great-power position. There is some truth to this line of reasoning (World War I did bankrupt Britain), but to put things properly in historical context, it is worth looking at this history from another angle. Britain's immense empire was the product of unique circumstances. The wonder is not that it declined but that its dominance lasted as long as it did. Understanding how Britain played its hand -- one that got weaker over time -- can help illuminate the United States' path forward.

Britain has been a rich country for centuries (and was a great power for most of that time), but it was an economic superpower for little more than a generation. Observers often make the mistake of dating its apogee by great imperial events such as the Diamond Jubilee. In fact, by 1897, Britain's best years were already behind it. Its true apogee was a generation earlier, from 1845 to 1870. At the time, it was producing more than 30 percent of global GDP. Its energy consumption was five times that of the United States and 155 times that of Russia. It accounted for one-fifth of the world's trade and two-fifths of its manufacturing trade. And all this was accomplished with just two percent of the world's population.
By the late 1870s, the United States had equaled Britain on most industrial measures, and by the early 1880s it had actually surpassed it, as Germany would about 15 years later. By World War I, the United States' economy was twice the size of Britain's, and together France's and Russia's were larger as well. In 1860, Britain had produced 53 percent of the world's iron (then a sign of supreme industrial strength); by 1914, it was making less than 10 percent.

Of course, politically, London was still the capital of the world at the time of World War I, and its writ was unequaled and largely unchallenged across much of the globe. Britain had acquired an empire in a period before the onset of nationalism, and so there were few obstacles to creating and maintaining control in far-flung places. Its sea power was unrivaled, and it remained dominant in banking, shipping, insurance, and investment. London was still the center of global finance, and the pound still the reserve currency of the world. Even in 1914, Britain invested twice as much capital abroad as its closest competitor, France, and five times as much as the United States. The economic returns of these investments and other "invisible trades" in some ways masked Britain's decline.
In fact, the British economy was sliding. British growth rates had dropped below two percent in the decades leading up to World War I. The United States and Germany, meanwhile, were growing at around five percent. Having spearheaded the first Industrial Revolution, Britain was less adept at moving into the second. The goods it was producing represented the past rather than the future. In 1907, for example, it manufactured four times as many bicycles as the United States did, but the United States manufactured 12 times as many cars.

Scholars have debated the causes of Britain's decline since shortly after that decline began. Some have focused on geopolitics; others, on economic factors, such as low investment in new plants and equipment and bad labor relations. British capitalism had remained old-fashioned and rigid, its industries set up as small cottage-scale enterprises with skilled craftsmen rather than the mass factories that sprang up in Germany and the United States. There were signs of broader cultural problems as well. A wealthier Britain was losing its focus on practical education, and British society retained a feudal cast, given to it by its landowning aristocracy.
But it may be that none of these failings was actually crucial. The historian Paul Kennedy has explained the highly unusual circumstances that produced Britain's dominance in the nineteenth century. Given its portfolio of power -- geography, population, resources -- Britain could reasonably have expected to account for three to four percent of global GDP, but its share rose to around ten times that figure. As those unusual circumstances abated -- as other Western countries caught up with industrialization, as Germany united, as the United States resolved its North-South divide -- Britain was bound to decline. The British statesman Leo Amery saw this clearly in 1905. "How can these little islands hold their own in the long run against such great and rich empires as the United States and Germany are rapidly becoming?" he asked. "How can we with forty millions of people compete with states nearly double our size?" It is a question that many Americans are now asking in the face of China's rise.
Britain managed to maintain its position as the leading world power for decades after it lost its economic dominance thanks to a combination of shrewd strategy and good diplomacy. Early on, as it saw the balance of power shifting, London made one critical decision that extended its influence by decades: it chose to accommodate itself to the rise of the United States rather than to contest it. In the decades after 1880, on issue after issue London gave in to a growing and assertive Washington.
It was not easy for Britain to cede control to its former colony, a country with which it had fought two wars and in whose recent civil war it had sympathized with the secessionists. But it was a strategic masterstroke. Had Britain tried to resist the rise of the United States, on top of all its other commitments, it would have been bled dry. For all of London's mistakes over the next half century, its strategy toward Washington -- one followed by every British government since the 1890s -- meant that Britain could focus its attention on other critical fronts. It remained, for example, the master of the seas, controlling its lanes and pathways with "five keys" that were said to lock up the world -- Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandria, Gibraltar, and Dover.
Britain maintained control of its empire and retained worldwide influence with relatively little opposition for many decades. (In the settlement after World War I, it took over 1.8 million square miles of territory and 13 million new subjects, mostly in the Middle East.) Still, the gap between its political role and its economic capacity was growing. By the twentieth century, the empire was an enormous drain on the British treasury. And this was no time for expensive habits. The British economy was reeling. World War I cost over $40 billion, and Britain, once the world's leading creditor, had debts amounting to 136 percent of domestic output afterward. By the mid-1920s, interest payments alone sucked up half the government's budget. Meanwhile, by 1936, Germany's defense spending was three times as high as Britain's. The same year that Italy invaded Ethiopia, Mussolini also placed 50,000 troops in Libya -- ten times the number of British troops guarding the Suez Canal. It was these circumstances -- coupled with the memory of a recent world war that had killed more than 700,000 young Britons -- that led the British governments of the 1930s, facing the forces of fascism, to prefer wishful thinking and appeasement to confrontation.
World War II was the final nail in the coffin of British economic power: in 1945, the United States' GDP was ten times that of Britain. Even then, Britain remained remarkably influential, at least partly because of the almost superhuman energy and ambition of Winston Churchill. Given that the United States was paying most of the Allies' economic costs, and Russia was bearing most of the casualties, it took extraordinary will for Britain to remain one of the three major powers deciding the fate of the postwar world. (The photographs of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 are somewhat misleading: there was no "big three" at Yalta; there was a "big two" plus one brilliant political entrepreneur who was able to keep himself and his country in the game.)

But even this came at a cost. In return for its loans to London, the United States took over dozens of British bases in Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. "The British Empire is handed over to the American pawnbroker -- our only hope," said one member of Parliament. The economist John Maynard Keynes described the Lend-Lease Act as an attempt to "pick out the eyes of the British Empire." Less emotional observers saw that the transition was inevitable. Toynbee, by then a distinguished historian, consoled Britons by noting that the United States' "hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia's, Germany's, or Japan's, and I suppose these are the alternatives."

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL EMPIRE
Britain was undone as a global power not because of bad politics but because of bad economics. Indeed, the impressive skill with which London played its weakening hand despite a 70-year economic decline offers important lessons for the United States. First, however, it is essential to note that the central feature of Britain's decline -- irreversible economic deterioration -- does not really apply to the United States today. Britain's unrivaled economic status lasted for a few decades; the United States' has lasted more than 120 years. The U.S. economy has been the world's largest since the middle of the 1880s, and it remains so today. In fact, the United States has held a surprisingly constant share of global GDP ever since. With the brief exception of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the rest of the industrialized world had been destroyed and its share rose to 50 percent, the United States has accounted for roughly a quarter of world output for over a century (32 percent in 1913, 26 percent in 1960, 22 percent in 1980, 27 percent in 2000, and 26 percent in 2007). It is likely to slip, but not significantly, in the next two decades. Most estimates suggest that in 2025 the United States' economy will still be twice the size of China's in terms of nominal GDP.
This difference between the United States and Britain is reflected in the burden of their military budgets. Britannia ruled the seas but never the land. The British army was sufficiently small that Otto von Bismarck once quipped that were the British ever to invade Germany, he would simply have the local police force arrest them. Meanwhile, London's advantage over the seas -- it had more tonnage than the next two navies put together -- came at ruinous cost. The U.S. military, in contrast, dominates at every level -- land, sea, air, space -- and spends more than the next 14 countries combined, accounting for almost 50 percent of global defense spending. The United States also spends more on defense research and development than the rest of the world put together. And crucially, it does all this without breaking the bank. U.S. defense expenditure as a percent of GDP is now 4.1 percent, lower than it was for most of the Cold War (under Dwight Eisenhower, it rose to ten percent). As U.S. GDP has grown larger and larger, expenditures that would have been backbreaking have become affordable. The Iraq war may be a tragedy or a noble endeavor, but either way, it will not bankrupt the United States. The price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan together -- $125 billion a year -- represents less than one percent of GDP. The war in Vietnam, by comparison, cost the equivalent of 1.6 percent of U.S. GDP in 1970, a large difference. (Neither of these percentages includes second- or third-order costs of war, which allows for a fair comparison even if one disputes the exact figures.)
U.S. military power is not the cause of its strength but the consequence. The fuel is the United States' economic and technological base, which remains extremely strong. The United States does face larger, deeper, and broader challenges than it has ever faced in its history, and it will undoubtedly lose some share of global GDP. But the process will look nothing like Britain's slide in the twentieth century, when the country lost the lead in innovation, energy, and entrepreneurship. The United States will remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology, and industry.
In trying to understand how the United States will fare in the new world, the first thing to do is simply look around: the future is already here. Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining breadth and depth. More countries are making goods, communications technology has been leveling the playing field, capital has been free to move across the world -- and the United States has benefited massively from these trends. Its economy has received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, and its companies have entered new countries and industries with great success. Despite two decades of a very expensive dollar, U.S. exports have held ground, and the World Economic Forum currently ranks the United States as the world's most competitive economy. GDP growth, the bottom line, has averaged just over three percent in the United States for 25 years, significantly higher than in Europe or Japan. Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, a full percentage point higher than the European average. This superior growth trajectory might be petering out, and perhaps U.S. growth will be more typical for an advanced industrialized country for the next few years. But the general point -- that the United States is a highly dynamic economy at the cutting edge, despite its enormous size -- holds.
Consider the industries of the future. Nanotechnology (applied science dealing with the control of matter at the atomic or molecular scale) is likely to lead to fundamental breakthroughs over the next 50 years, and the United States dominates the field. It has more dedicated "nanocenters" than the next three nations (Germany, Britain, and China) combined and has issued more patents for nanotechnology than the rest of the world combined, highlighting its unusual strength in turning abstract theory into practical products. Biotechnology (a broad category that describes the use of biological systems to create medical, agricultural, and industrial products) is also dominated by the United States. Biotech revenues in the United States approached $50 billion in 2005, five times as large as the amount in Europe and representing 76 percent of global biotech revenues.
Manufacturing has, of course, been leaving the country, shifting to the developing world and turning the United States into a service economy. This scares many Americans, who wonder what their country will make if everything is "made in China." But Asian manufacturing must be viewed in the context of a global economy. The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows spent a year in China watching its manufacturing juggernaut up close, and he provides a persuasive explanation of how outsourcing has strengthened U.S. competitiveness. What it comes down to is that the real money is in designing and distributing products -- which the United States dominates -- rather than manufacturing them. A vivid example of this is the iPod: it is manufactured mostly outside the United States, but most of the added value is captured by Apple, in California.

Many experts and scholars, and even a few politicians, worry about certain statistics that bode ill for the United States. The U.S. savings rate is zero; the current account deficit, the trade deficit, and the budget deficit are high; the median income is flat; and commitments for entitlements are unsustainable. These are all valid concerns that will have to be addressed. But it is important to keep in mind that many frequently cited statistics offer only an approximate or an antiquated measure of an economy. Many of them were developed in the late nineteenth century to describe industrial economies with limited cross-border activity, not modern economies in today's interconnected global market.
For the last two decades, for example, the United States has had unemployment rates well below levels economists thought possible without driving up inflation. Or consider that the United States' current account deficit -- which in 2007 reached $800 billion, or seven percent of GDP -- was supposed to be unsustainable at four percent of GDP. The current account deficit is at a dangerous level, but its magnitude can be explained in part by the fact that there is a worldwide surplus of savings and that the United States remains an unusually stable and attractive place to invest. The decrease in personal savings, as the Harvard economist Richard Cooper has noted, has been largely offset by an increase in corporate savings. The U.S. investment picture also looks much rosier if education and research-and-development spending are considered along with spending on physical capital and housing.
The United States has serious problems. By all calculations, Medicare threatens to blow up the federal budget. The swing from surpluses to deficits between 2000 and 2008 has serious implications. Growing inequality (the result of the knowledge economy, technology, and globalization) has become a signature feature of the new era. Perhaps most worrying, Americans are borrowing 80 percent of the world's surplus savings and using it for consumption: they are selling off their assets to foreigners to buy a couple more lattes a day. But such problems must be considered in the context of an overall economy that remains powerful and dynamic.

EDUCATION NATION
"Ah, yes," say those who are more worried, "but you are looking at a snapshot of today. The United States' advantages are rapidly eroding as the country loses its scientific and technological base and suffers from inexorable cultural decay." A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification, the argument goes, has become one that revels in instant pleasures; Americans are losing interest in the basics -- math, manufacturing, hard work, savings -- and becoming a society that specializes in consumption and leisure.
No statistic seems to capture this anxiety better than those showing the decline of engineering in the United States. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that the United States could soon lose its privileged position as the world's science leader. The report said that in 2004 China graduated 600,000 engineers, India 350,000, and the United States 70,000 -- numbers that were repeated in countless articles, books, and speeches. And indeed, these figures do seem to be cause for despair. What hope does the United States have if for every one qualified American engineer there are more than a dozen Chinese and Indian ones? For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the United States, the report pointed out, a company could hire five Chinese chemists or 11 Indian engineers.
The numbers, however, are wrong. Several academics and journalists investigated the matter and quickly realized that the Asian totals included graduates of two- or three-year programs training students in simple technical tasks. The National Science Foundation, which tracks these statistics in the United States and other nations, puts the Chinese number at about 200,000 engineering degrees per year, and the Rochester Institute of Technology's Ron Hira puts the number of Indian engineering graduates at about 125,000 a year. This means that the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either China or India does.
And the numbers do not address the issue of quality. The best and brightest in China and India -- those who, for example, excel at India's famous engineering academies, the Indian Institutes of Technology (5,000 out of 300,000 applicants make it past the entrance exams) -- would do well in any educational system. But once you get beyond such elite institutions -- which graduate under 10,000 students a year -- the quality of higher education in China and India remains extremely poor, which is why so many students leave those countries to get trained abroad. In 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute did a study of "the emerging global labor market" and found that 28 low-wage countries had approximately 33 million young professionals at their disposal. But, the study noted, "only a fraction of potential job candidates could successfully work at a foreign company," largely because of inadequate education.
Indeed, higher education is the United States' best industry. In no other field is the United States' advantage so overwhelming. A 2006 report from the London-based Center for European Reform points out that the United States invests 2.6 percent of its GDP in higher education, compared with 1.2 percent in Europe and 1.1 percent in Japan. Depending on which study you look at, the United States, with five percent of the world's population, has either seven or eight of the world's top ten universities and either 48 percent or 68 percent of the top 50. The situation in the sciences is particularly striking.
In India, universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.'s in computer science each year; in the United States, the figure is 1,000. A list of where the world's 1,000 best computer scientists were educated shows that the top ten schools are all American. The United States also remains by far the most attractive destination for students, taking in 30 percent of the total number of foreign students globally, and its collaborations between business and educational institutions are unmatched anywhere in the world. All these advantages will not be erased easily, because the structure of European and Japanese universities -- mostly state-run bureaucracies -- is unlikely to change. And although China and India are opening new institutions, it is not that easy to create a world-class university out of whole cloth in a few decades.
Few people believe that U.S. primary and secondary schools deserve similar praise. The school system, the line goes, is in crisis, with its students performing particularly badly in science and math, year after year, in international rankings. But the statistics here, although not wrong, reveal something slightly different. The real problem is one not of excellence but of access. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the standard for comparing educational programs across nations, puts the United States squarely in the middle of the pack. The media reported the news with a predictable penchant for direness: "Economic Time Bomb: U.S. Teens Are Among Worst at Math," declared The Wall Street Journal.

But the aggregate scores hide deep regional, racial, and socioeconomic variation. Poor and minority students score well below the U.S. average, while, as one study noted, "students in affluent suburban U.S. school districts score nearly as well as students in Singapore, the runaway leader on TIMSS math scores." The difference between the average science scores in poor and wealthy school districts within the United States, for instance, is four to five times as high as the difference between the U.S. and the Singaporean national average. In other words, the problem with U.S. education is a problem of inequality. This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country. But it does know what works.
The U.S. system may be too lax when it comes to rigor and memorization, but it is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind. It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why the United States produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore's minister of education, explains the difference between his country's system and that of the United States: "We both have meritocracies," Shanmugaratnam says.
"Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority." This is one reason that Singaporean officials recently visited U.S. schools to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem solving. "Just by watching, you can see students are more engaged, instead of being spoon-fed all day," one Singaporean visitor told The Washington Post. While the United States marvels at Asia's test-taking skills, Asian governments come to the United States to figure out how to get their children to think.
THE GRAY ZONE

The United States' advantages might seem obvious when compared with conditions in Asia, which is still a continent of mostly developing countries. Against Europe, the margin is slimmer than many Americans believe. The eurozone has been growing at an impressive clip, about the same pace per capita as the United States since 2000. It takes in half the world's foreign investment, boasts strong labor productivity, and posted a $30 billion trade surplus in the first ten months of 2007. In the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, European countries occupy seven of the top ten slots. Europe has its problems -- high unemployment, rigid labor markets -- but it also has advantages, including more efficient and fiscally sustainable health-care and pension systems. All in all, Europe presents the most significant short-term challenge to the United States in the economic realm.
But Europe has one crucial disadvantage. Or, to put it more accurately, the United States has one crucial advantage over Europe and most of the developed world. The United States is demographically vibrant. Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that the U.S. population will increase by 65 million by 2030, whereas Europe's population will remain "virtually stagnant." Europe, Eberstadt notes, "will by that time have more than twice as many seniors older than 65 than children under 15, with drastic implications for future aging. (Fewer children now means fewer workers later.) In the United States, by contrast, children will continue to outnumber the elderly. The United Nations Population Division estimates that the ratio of working-age people to senior citizens in western Europe will drop from 3.8:1 today to just 2.4:1 in 2030. In the U.S., the figure will fall from 5.4:1 to 3.1:1."
The only real way to avert this demographic decline is for Europe to take in more immigrants. Native Europeans actually stopped replacing themselves as early as 2007, and so even maintaining the current population will require modest immigration. Growth will require much more. But European societies do not seem able to take in and assimilate people from strange and unfamiliar cultures, especially from rural and backward regions in the world of Islam. The question of who is at fault here -- the immigrant or the society -- is irrelevant. The reality is that Europe is moving toward taking in fewer immigrants at a time when its economic future rides on its ability to take in many more. The United States, on the other hand, is creating the first universal nation, made up of all colors, races, and creeds, living and working together in considerable harmony. Consider the current presidential election, in which the contestants have included a black man, a woman, a Mormon, a Hispanic, and an Italian American.
Surprisingly, many Asian countries (with India an exception) are in demographic situations similar to or even worse than Europe's. The fertility rates in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, and estimates indicate that the major East Asian nations will face a sizable reduction in their working-age populations over the next half century. The working-age population in Japan has already peaked; by 2010, Japan will have three million fewer workers than it did in 2005. The worker populations in China and South Korea are also likely to peak within the next decade. Goldman Sachs predicts that China's median age will rise from 33 in 2005 to 45 in 2050, a remarkable graying of the population. And Asian countries have as much trouble with immigrants as European countries do. Japan faces a large prospective worker shortage because it can neither take in enough immigrants nor allow its women to fully participate in the labor force.
The effects of an aging population are considerable. First, there is the pension burden -- fewer workers supporting more gray-haired elders. Second, as the economist Benjamin Jones has shown, most innovative inventors -- and the overwhelming majority of Nobel laureates -- do their most important work between the ages of 30 and 44. A smaller working-age population, in other words, means fewer technological, scientific, and managerial advances. Third, as workers age, they go from being net savers to being net spenders, with dire ramifications for national savings and investment rates. For advanced industrialized countries, bad demographics are a killer disease.
The United States' potential advantages today are in large part a product of immigration. Without immigration, the United States' GDP growth over the last quarter century would have been the same as Europe's. Native-born white Americans have the same low fertility rates as Europeans. Foreign students and immigrants account for 50 percent of the science researchers in the country and in 2006 received 40 percent of the doctorates in science and engineering and 65 percent of the doctorates in computer science. By 2010, foreign students will get more than 50 percent of all the Ph.D.'s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure will be closer to 75 percent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or a first-generation American. In short, the United States' potential new burst of productivity, its edge in nanotechnology and biotechnology, its ability to invent the future -- all rest on its immigration policies. If the United States can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen there. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.
Immigration also gives the United States a quality rare for a rich country -- dynamism. The country has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are eager to make a new life in a new world. Some Americans have always worried about such immigrants -- whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. The United States has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other past great economic powers that have grown fat and lazy and slipped behind as they faced the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.
LEARNING FROM THE WORLD

In 2005, New York City got a wake-up call. Twenty-four of the world's 25 largest initial public offerings that year were held in countries other than the United States. This was stunning. The United States' capital markets have long been the biggest in the world. They financed the turnaround in manufacturing in the 1980s and the technology revolution of the 1990s, and they are today financing the ongoing advances in bioscience. It is the fluidity of these markets that has kept American business nimble. If the United States is losing this distinctive advantage, it is very bad news.
Much of the discussion around the problem has focused on the United States' regulation, particularly post-Enron laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and the constant threat of litigation that hovers over businesses in the United States. These obstacles are there, but they do not really get at what has shifted business abroad. The United States is conducting business as usual. But others are joining in the game. What is really happening here, as in other areas, is simple: the rise of the rest. The United States' sum total of stocks, bonds, deposits, loans, and other financial instruments -- its financial stock, in other words -- still exceeds that of any other region, but other regions are seeing their financial stock grow much more quickly. This is especially true of the rising countries of Asia, but even the eurozone is outpacing the United States. Europe's total banking and trading revenues, $98 billion in 2005, have nearly pulled equal to the United States' revenues. And when it comes to new derivatives based on underlying financial instruments such as stocks or interest-rate payments, which are increasingly important for hedge funds, banks, and insurers, London is the dominant player already. This is all part of a broader trend. Countries and companies now have options that they never had before.
In this and other regards, the United States is not doing worse than usual. It functions as it always has -- perhaps subconsciously assuming that it is still leagues ahead of the pack. U.S. legislators rarely think about the rest of the world when writing laws, regulations, and policies. U.S. officials rarely refer to global standards. After all, for so long the United States was the global standard, and when it chose to do something different, it was important enough that the rest of the world would cater to its exceptionality. The United States is the only country in the world other than Liberia and Myanmar that is not on the metric system. Other than Somalia, it is alone in not ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In business, the United States did not need to benchmark. It was the one teaching the world how to be capitalist. But now everyone is playing the United States' game, and playing to win.
For most of the last 30 years, the United States had the lowest corporate tax rates of the major industrialized countries. Today, it has the second highest. U.S. rates have not gone up; others have come down. Germany, for example, long a staunch believer in its high-taxation system, has cut its rates in response to moves by countries to its east, such as Austria and Slovakia. This kind of competition among industrialized countries is now widespread. It is not a race to the bottom -- Scandinavian countries have high taxes, good services, and strong growth -- but a quest for growth. U.S. regulations used to be more flexible and market-friendly than all others. That is no longer true. London's financial system was overhauled in 2001, with a single entity replacing a confusing mishmash of regulators, which is one reason that London's financial sector now beats out New York's on some measures. The entire British government works aggressively to make London a global hub. Regulators from Warsaw to Shanghai to Mumbai are moving every day to make their systems more attractive to investors and manufacturers. Washington, by contrast, spends its time and energy thinking of ways to tax New York, so that it can send its revenues to the rest of the country.
Being on top for so long has its downsides. The U.S. market has been so large that Americans have assumed that the rest of the world would take the trouble to understand it and them. They have not had to reciprocate by learning foreign languages, cultures, or markets. Now, that could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage. Take the spread of English worldwide as a metaphor. Americans have delighted in this process because it makes it so much easier for them to travel and do business abroad. But it also gives the locals an understanding of and access to two markets and cultures. They can speak English but also Mandarin or Hindi or Portuguese. They can penetrate the U.S. market but also the internal Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian one. Americans, by contrast, have never developed the ability to move into other people's worlds.
The United States is used to being the leading economy and society. It has not noticed that most of the rest of the industrialized world -- and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well -- has better cell-phone service than the United States. Computer connectivity is faster and cheaper across the rest of the industrialized world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands 16th in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing they have to learn from other countries' health-care systems is to be thankful for their own. Americans rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, let alone adopt them.
Learning from the rest is no longer a matter of morality or politics. Increasingly, it is about competitiveness. Consider the automobile industry. For more than a century after 1894, most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In the United States, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health-care system, the cost to them is around $800 per worker. This is not necessarily an advertisement for the Canadian health-care system, but it does make clear that the costs of the U.S. health-care system have risen to a point where there is a significant competitive disadvantage to hiring American workers. Jobs are going not to low-wage countries but to places where well-trained and educated workers can be found: it is smart benefits, not low wages, that employers are looking for.
For decades, American workers, whether in car companies, steel plants, or banks, had one enormous advantage over all other workers: privileged access to American capital. They could use that access to buy technology and training that no one else had -- and thus produce products that no one else could, and at competitive prices. That special access is also gone. The world is swimming in capital, and suddenly American workers have to ask themselves, What can we do better than others? It is a dilemma not just for workers but for companies as well. When American companies went abroad, they used to bring with them capital and know-how. But when they go abroad now, they discover that the natives already have money and already know how.
There really is not a Third World anymore. So what do American companies bring to Brazil or India? What is the United States' competitive advantage? This is a question few American businesspeople thought they would ever have to answer. The answer lies in something the economist Martin Wolf noted. Economists used to discuss two basic concepts, capital and labor. But these are now commodities, widely available to everyone. What distinguishes economies today are ideas and energy. A country can prosper if it is a source of ideas or energy for the world.

DO-NOTHING POLITICS
The United States has been and can continue to be the world's most important source of new ideas, big and small, technical and creative, economic and political. (If it were truly innovative, it could generate new ideas to produce new kinds of energy.) But to do that, it has to make some significant changes. The United States has a history of worrying that it is losing its edge. Today's is at least the fourth wave of such concern since World War II. The first was in the late 1950s, a result of the Soviet Union's launching of the Sputnik satellite. The second was in the early 1970s, when high oil prices and slow growth convinced Americans that Western Europe and Saudi Arabia were the powers of the future. The third one arrived in the mid-1980s, when most experts believed that Japan would be the technologically and economically dominant superpower of the future. The concern in each of these cases was well founded, the projections intelligent. But none of the feared scenarios came to pass. The reason is that the U.S. system proved to be flexible, resourceful, and resilient, able to correct its mistakes and shift its attention. A focus on U.S. economic decline ended up preventing it.
The problem today is that the U.S. political system seems to have lost its ability to fix its ailments. The economic problems in the United States today are real, but by and large they are not the product of deep inefficiencies within the U.S. economy, nor are they reflections of cultural decay. They are the consequences of specific government policies. Different policies could quickly and relatively easily move the United States onto a far more stable footing. A set of sensible reforms could be enacted tomorrow to trim wasteful spending and subsidies, increase savings, expand training in science and technology, secure pensions, create a workable immigration process, and achieve significant efficiencies in the use of energy. Policy experts do not have wide disagreements on most of these issues, and none of the proposed measures would require sacrifices reminiscent of wartime hardship, only modest adjustments of existing arrangements. And yet, because of politics, they appear impossible. The U.S. political system has lost the ability to accept some pain now for great gain later on.

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. What was an antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with (now about 225 years old) has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia -- politics as theater -- and very little substance, compromise, or action. A can-do country is now saddled with a do-nothing political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.
It is clever contrarianism to be in favor of sharp party politics and against worthy calls for bipartisanship. Some political scientists have long wished that U.S. political parties were more like European ones -- ideologically pure and tightly disciplined. But Europe's parliamentary systems work well with partisan parties. In them, the executive branch always controls the legislative branch, and so the party in power can implement its agenda easily. The U.S. system, by contrast, is one of shared power, overlapping functions, and checks and balances. Progress requires broad coalitions between the two major parties and politicians who will cross the aisle. That is why James Madison distrusted political parties, lumping them together with all kinds of "factions" and considering them a grave danger to the young American republic.

Progress on any major problem -- health care, Social Security, tax reform -- will require compromise from both sides. It requires a longer-term perspective. And that has become politically deadly. Those who advocate sensible solutions and compromise legislation find themselves being marginalized by their party's leadership, losing funds from special-interest groups, and being constantly attacked by their "side" on television and radio. The system provides greater incentives to stand firm and go back and tell your team that you refused to bow to the enemy. It is great for fundraising, but it is terrible for governing.
THE RISE OF THE REST

The real test for the United States is the opposite of that faced by Britain in 1900. Britain's economic power waned even as it managed to maintain immense political influence around the world. The U.S. economy and American society, in contrast, are capable of responding to the economic pressures and competition they face. They can adjust, adapt, and persevere. The test for the United States is political -- and it rests not just with the United States at large but with Washington in particular. Can Washington adjust and adapt to a world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shifts in economic requirements and political power?
The world has been one in which the United States was utterly unrivaled for two decades. It has been, in a broader sense, a U.S.-designed world since the end of World War II. But it is now in the midst of one of history's greatest periods of change.
There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last 500 years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life -- its politics, economics, and culture. The first was the rise of the Western world, a process that began in the fifteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the late eighteenth century. It produced modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also produced the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West.
The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of the United States. Soon after it industrialized, the United States became the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For most of the last century, the United States has dominated global economics, politics, science, culture, and ideas. For the last 20 years, that dominance has been unrivaled, a phenomenon unprecedented in history.
We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era -- the rise of the rest. Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. Although they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been vigorously forward. (This growth has been most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it, which is why to call this change "the rise of Asia" does not describe it accurately.)
The emerging international system is likely to be quite different from those that have preceded it. A hundred years ago, there was a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments, with constantly shifting alliances, rivalries, miscalculations, and wars. Then came the duopoly of the Cold War, more stable in some ways, but with the superpowers reacting and overreacting to each other's every move. Since 1991, we have lived under a U.S. imperium, a unique, unipolar world in which the open global economy has expanded and accelerated. This expansion is driving the next change in the nature of the international order. At the politico-military level, we remain in a single-superpower world. But polarity is not a binary phenomenon. The world will not stay unipolar for decades and then suddenly, one afternoon, become multipolar. On every dimension other than military power -- industrial, financial, social, cultural -- the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from U.S. dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.
There are many specific policies and programs one could advocate to make the United States' economy and society more competitive. But beyond all these what is also needed is a broader change in strategy and attitude. The United States must come to recognize that it faces a choice -- it can stabilize the emerging world order by bringing in the new rising nations, ceding some of its own power and perquisites, and accepting a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints. Or it can watch as the rise of the rest produces greater nationalism, diffusion, and disintegration, which will slowly tear apart the world order that the United States has built over the last 60 years. The case for the former is obvious. The world is changing, but it is going the United States' way.
The rest that are rising are embracing markets, democratic government (of some form or another), and greater openness and transparency. It might be a world in which the United States takes up less space, but it is one in which American ideas and ideals are overwhelmingly dominant. The United States has a window of opportunity to shape and master the changing global landscape, but only if it first recognizes that the post-American world is a reality -- and embraces and celebrates that fact.

By Fareed Zakaria