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According to projections by Goldman Sachs, as shown in Figure 1, the three largest economies in the world by 2050 will be China, followed by a closely matched America and India some way behind, and then Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Indonesia. [6] Only two European countries feature in the top ten, namely the UK and Germany in ninth and tenth place respectively. Of the present G7, only four appear in the top ten. In similar forecasts, PricewaterhouseCoopers suggest that the Brazilian economy could be larger than Japan’s, and that the Russian, Mexican and Indonesian economies could each be bigger than the German, French and UK economies by 2050. [7] If these projections, or something similar, are borne out in practice, then during the next four decades the world will come to look like a very different place indeed.
Figure 1. Projected size of national economies.
Such a scenario was far from people’s minds in 2001. Following 9/11, the United States not only saw itself as the sole superpower but attempted to establish a new global role which reflected that pre-eminence. The neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century, established in 1997 by, amongst others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, adopted a statement of principles which articulated the new doctrine and helped prepare the ground for the Bush administration:
As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests? [8]
In 2004 the influential neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer wrote:
On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new — a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a staggering development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. [9]
The new century dawned with the world deeply aware of and preoccupied by the prospect of what appeared to be overwhelming American power. The neo-conservatives chose to interpret the world through the prism of the defeat of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming military superiority enjoyed by the United States, rather than in terms of the underlying trend towards economic multipolarity, which was downplayed. The new doctrine placed a premium on the importance of the United States maintaining a huge military lead over other countries in order to deter potential rivals, and on the US pursuing its own interests rather than being constrained either by its allies or international agreements. [10] In the post-Cold War era, US military expenditure was almost as great as that of all the other nations of the world combined: never in the history of the human race has the military inequality between one nation and all others been so great. [11] The Bush presidency’s foreign policy marked an important shift compared with that of previous administrations: the war on terror became the new imperative, America ’s relations with Western Europe were accorded reduced significance, the principle of national sovereignty was denigrated and that of regime-change affirmed, [12] culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Far from the United States presiding over a reshaping of global affairs, however, it rapidly found itself beleaguered in Iraq and enjoying less global support than at any time since 1945. [13] The exercise of overwhelming military power proved of little effect in Iraq but served to squander the reserves of soft power — in Joseph S. Nye’s words, ‘the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals and policies’ [14] — that the United States had accumulated since 1945. [15] Failing to comprehend the significance of deeper economic trends, as well as misreading the situation in Iraq, the Bush administration overestimated American power and thereby overplayed its hand, with the consequence that its policies had exactly the opposite effect to that which had been intended: instead of enhancing the US’s position in the world, Bush’s foreign policy seriously weakened it. The neo-conservative position represented a catastrophic misreading of history.
Figure 2. Global distribution of military expenditure in 2008 (billions of U.S. dollars).
Military and political power rest on economic strength. As Paul Ke
[6] Dominic Wilson and A
[7] John Hawksworth and Gordon Cookson, ‘The World in 2050 — Beyond the BRICs: A Broader Look at Emerging Market Growth Prospects’, PricewaterhouseCoopers, March 2008, p. 3.
[8] www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm.
[9] Charles Krauthammer, ‘An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World’, Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute Di
[10] Philippe Sands, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules (London: Allen Lane, 2005), Chapters 3–4, 10.
[11] www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp#InContextUSMilitary. SpendingVersusRestoftheWorld.
[12] The argument against the inviolability of national sovereignty, of course, has various rationales, notably failed states and so-called rogue states. Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), and ‘Civilise or Die’, Guardian, 23 October 2003; Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (London: Vintage, 2003). Ignatieff quite wrongly suggests (p. 21) that ‘we are living through the collapse into disorder of many [my italics] of these former colonial states’ in Asia and Africa.
[13] G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 12.
[14] Joseph S. Nye Jr, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. x.
[15] Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), Chapter 9.
[16] Paul Ke
[17] Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), p. 261.
[18] Ibid., p. 258.
[19] See Christopher Chase-Du