[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

[Bill Totten]

by Parag Khanna

New York Times (January 27 2008)


Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's 1999.
Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to
intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world
America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and
Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It's as if the
first decade of the 21st century didn't happen - and almost as if
history itself doesn't happen. But the distribution of power in the
world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of
George W Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant,
despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history
happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama
administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled
out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of
Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force
presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has
absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the
Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea.
The European Union has expanded to well over thirty members and has
secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea,
as well as substantial nuclear energy. America's standing in the world
remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren't we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and
reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to
collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America's
image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little.
Condoleezza Rice has said America has no "permanent enemies", but it has
no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were
signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America's
armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the
form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and "asymmetric" weapons
like suicide bombers. America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic
and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct
an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there
is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that
was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war "peace dividend" was never
converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now,
rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing - and losing - in a
geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the
European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the
new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by
Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not
India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic
appetite. The Big Three make the rules - their own rules - without any
one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors
in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and
Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new
global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European
powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an
"East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe.
What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global,
multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

In Europe's capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators
increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America
and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European
Parliament, calls it "European patriotism". The Europeans play both
sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It's a trend that
will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the
self-described "friend of America", and Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort
American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common
army; the only problem is that it doesn't really need one. Europeans use
intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social
policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic
strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue
Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding
it closer to the EU even if it never becomes a member. And each year a
new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or
Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one
country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from
Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury - carrying a big
wallet. The EU's market is the world's largest, European technologies
more and more set the global standard and European countries give the
most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world's
money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed
at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would
bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil
exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer
price its oil in "worthless" dollars. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
went on to suggest euros. It doesn't help that Congress revealed its
true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal
in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world's financial
capital for stock listing, it's no surprise that China's new state
investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead
of New York. Meanwhile, America's share of global exchange reserves has
dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bundchen demands to be paid in euros,
while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft
power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe's influence grows at America's expense. While America fumbles
at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on
locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the
world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American
dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the EU; we offer no
equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy
like Europe's, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of
the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin:
twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the US. We didn't educate
them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in
decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few
seem to want - like the International Monetary Fund - while Europe
excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The US
has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings -
consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas - let alone when
it's not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the
region's answer to America's Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too
busy restoring its place as the world's "Middle Kingdom" to be
distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the
United States. In America's own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to
Chavez's Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment
deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own
engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In
Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making
major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is
abetting China's spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share
of trade in its gross domestic product - and China is exporting weapons
at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning
America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every
country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the US now
enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran
being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western
peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a
35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia's
rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged.
Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America's economic
uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own
regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased
loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the
India-Japan-Australia triangle - of which China sits at the center - has
surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is
being built from the inside out, resulting in America's grip on the
Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to
Indonesia to Korea, no country - friend of America's or not - wants
political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a
bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing
against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of
Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural
reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian
countries - the so-called Stans - China is the new heavyweight player,
its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling
defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich
Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization
gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and
may eventually become the "NATO of the East".

The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies". Twenty-first-century
geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead
of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three
hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe
and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics
realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic
zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a
power base from which to intrude in others' terrain. But in a globalized
and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways,
both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in
America's backyard, America and China will compete for African resources
in Europe's southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to
profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China's
growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The
main battlefield is what I call "the second world".

The Swing States

There are plenty of statistics that will still tell the story of
America's global dominance: our military spending, our share of the
global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are
trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline
around the world, I've spent the past two years traveling in some forty
countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet - the
countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of
the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside
and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states
that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the
next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to
Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way
to win allies and influence countries but three: America's coalition (as
in "coalition of the willing"), Europe's consensus and China's
consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will
lead the 21st century.

The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South
America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just "emerging
markets". If you include China, they hold a majority of the world's
foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is
making them the global economy's most important new consumer markets and
thus engines of global growth - not replacing the United States but not
dependent on it either. IPOs from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume
raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries'
rising importance in corporate finance - even after you subtract China.
When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of
power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs
for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and
infrastructure - all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their
loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of
them at the same time. Second-world states won't be subdued: in the age
of network power, they won't settle for being mere export markets.
Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and
to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence.

While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not
as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected,
parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while
other, often larger, parts might remain in the third. I wondered whether
globalization would accelerate these nations' becoming ever more
fragmented, or if governments
would step up to establish central control. Each second-world country
appeared to have a fissured personality under pressures from both
internal forces and neighbors. I realized that to make sense of the
second world, it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out.

Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their
potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable
commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every
second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic,
strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the
United States, the EU or China has a strong influence on what others in
its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push
Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next
set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the
world's balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.

In exploring just a small sample of the second world, we should start
perhaps with the hardest case: Russia. Apparently stabilized and
resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a
superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its
muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a
staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be
not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so - spread across a land so vast
that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia
today, and you'll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of
crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens
whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow. The
forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily
reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes.
Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of
Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or
less annexing Russia's Far East for its timber and other natural
resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were "no
disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border", a prophecy that seems ever
closer to fulfillment.

Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe,
while appearing to be bullied by Russia's oil-dependent diplomacy, is
staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the
size of France's. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil
from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding
the lever of being by far Russia's largest investor. The European Bank
for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help
build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while
London and Berlin welcome Russia's billionaires, allowing the likes of
Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The EU and US also
finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan
nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately,
some EU officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it's
just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its
Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist
peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative - becoming a
petro-vassal of China.

Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial
moments of geopolitical truth. During the cold war, NATO was the
principal vehicle for relations with Turkey, the West's listening post
on the southwestern Soviet border. But with Turkey's bending over
backward to avoid outright EU rejection, its refusal in 2003 to let the
US use Turkish territory as a staging point for invading Iraq marked a
turning point - away from the US "America always says it lobbies the EU
on our behalf", a Turkish strategic analyst in Ankara told me, "but all
that does is make the EU more stringent. We don't need that kind of help
anymore."

To be sure, Turkish pride contains elements of an aggressive
neo-Ottomanism that is in tension with some EU standards, but this could
ultimately serve as Europe's weapon to project stability into Syria,
Iraq and Iran - all of which Europe effectively borders through Turkey
itself. Roads are the pathways to power, as I learned driving across
Turkey in a beat-up Volkswagen a couple of summers ago. Turkey's master
engineers have been boring tunnels, erecting bridges and flattening
roads across the country's massive eastern realm, allowing it to assert
itself over the Arab and Persian worlds both militarily and economically
as Turkish merchants look as much East as West. Already joint
Euro-Turkish projects have led to the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
pipeline, with a matching rail line and highway planned to buttress
European influence all the way to Turkey's fraternal friend Azerbaijan
on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

It takes only one glance at Istanbul's shimmering skyline to realize
that even if Turkey never becomes an actual EU member, it is becoming
ever more Europeanized. Turkey receives more than $20 billion in foreign
investment and more than twenty million tourists every year, the vast
majority of both from EU countries. Ninety percent of the Turkish
diaspora lives in Western Europe and sends home another $1 billion per
year in remittances and investments. This remitted capital is spreading
growth and development eastward in the form of new construction
ventures, kilim factories and schools. With the accession of Romania and
Bulgaria to the EU a year ago, Turkey now physically borders the EU
(beyond its narrow frontier with Greece), symbolizing how Turkey is
becoming a part of the European superpower.

Western diplomats have a long historical familiarity, however dramatic
and tumultuous, with Russia and Turkey. But what about the Stans:
landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since
these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China
has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron. Trade, oil pipelines
and military exercises with China under the auspices of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization make it the new organizing pole for the region,
with the US scrambling to maintain modest military bases in the region.
(Currently it is forced to rely far too much on Afghanistan after being
booted, at China's and Russia's behest, from the Karshi Khanabad base in
Uzbekistan in 2005.) The challenge of getting ahead in the strategically
located and energy-rich Stans is the challenge of a bidding contest in
which values seem not to matter. While China buys more Kazakh oil and
America bids for defense contracts, Europe offers sustained investment
and holds off from giving President Nursultan Nazarbayev the high-status
recognition he craves. Kazakhstan considers itself a "strategic partner"
of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe
government officials to cancel the others' contracts and spy on one
another through contract workers - all in the name of preventing the
others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.

Just one example of the lengths to which foreigners will go to stay on
good terms with Nazarbayev is the current negotiation between a
consortium of Western energy giants, including ENI and Exxon, and
Kazakhstan's state-run oil company over the development of the Caspian's
massive Kashagan oil field. At present, the consortium is coughing up at
least $4 billion as well as a large hand-over of shares to compensate
for delayed exploration and production - and Kazakhstan isn't satisfied
yet. The lesson from Kazakhstan, and its equally strategic but far less
predictable neighbor Uzbekistan, is how fickle the second world can be,
its alignments changing on a whim and causing headaches and ripple
effects in all directions. To be distracted elsewhere or to lack
sufficient personnel on the ground can make the difference between
winning and losing a major round of the new great game.

The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America
ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe.
Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to
America's backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe
Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin
America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own.
Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chavez.
It was Simon Bolivar who fought ferociously for South America's
independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent
to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms.
Hugo Chavez, the country's clownish colonel, may last for decades to
come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called America's
bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the
Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders
across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out
the IMF and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle,
wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they
can stand up to the great Northern power. Chavez stands not only on the
ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and
hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country's largest
investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela's dilapidated oil
rigs while building its own refineries.

But Chavez's challenge to the United States is, in inspiration,
ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even
with Chavez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South
America's natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has
led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the US on
its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies.
Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is
as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to
the US Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold
war, wasted little time before declaring a "strategic alliance" with
China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil
shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and
China investing in Brazil's hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe
factories. Both China and Brazil's ambitions may soon alter the very
geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct
a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific
Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America
has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in
the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too
far away.

The Middle East - spanning from Morocco to Iran - lies between the hubs
of influence of the Big Three and has the largest number of second-world
swing states. No doubt the thaw with Libya, brokered by America and
Britain after Muammar el-Qaddafi declared he would abandon his country's
nuclear pursuits in 2003, was partly motivated by growing demand for
energy from a close Mediterranean neighbor. But Qaddafi is not selling
out. He and his advisers have astutely parceled out production sharing
agreements to a balanced assortment of American, European, Chinese and
other Asian oil giants. Mindful of the history of Western oil companies'
exploitation of Arabia, he - like Chavez in Venezuela and Nazarbayev in
Kazakhstan - has also cleverly ratcheted up the pressure on foreigners
to share more revenue with the regime by tweaking contracts, rounding
numbers liberally and threatening expropriation. What I find in
virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but
rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world
rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms And
as Egypt, Syria and other Arab states receive greater investment from
the Persian Gulf and start spending more on their own, they, too, become
increasingly important second-world players who can thwart the US

Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planet's leading
oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up
for grabs. For the past several decades, America's share of the foreign
direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the country's
foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and
Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia
has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it
has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no
mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military
dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major
common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each
of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.

For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the
same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create
discord among the US and EU on sanctions; it has also courted China,
nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran
represents the final square in China's hopscotch maneuvering to reach
the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of
Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for
natural gas from Iran's immense North Pars field, another one for
construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to
extend the Tehran metro - and it has boosted shipment of
ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several
years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal
to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China
(and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy
Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will
indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of
backing from China and from its second-world friends - without giving
any ground to the West.

Interestingly, it is precisely Muslim oil-producing states - Libya,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, (mostly Muslim) Kazakhstan, Malaysia - that seem the
best at spreading their alignments across some combination of the Big
Three simultaneously: getting what they want while fending off
encroachment from others. America may seek Muslim allies for its image
and the "war on terror", but these same countries seem also to be part
of what Samuel Huntington called the "Confucian-Islamic connection".
What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower
feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world's crucial
pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran,
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western
diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese
aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being
able to do much of anything about them.

This applies most profoundly in China's own backyard, Southeast Asia.
Some of the most dynamic countries in the region Malaysia, Thailand and
Vietnam are playing the superpower suitor game with admirable savvy.
Chinese migrants have long pulled the strings in the region's economies
even while governments sealed defense agreements with the US. Today,
Malaysia and Thailand still perform joint military exercises with
America but also buy weapons from, and have defense treaties with,
China, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by which Asian
nations have pledged nonaggression against one another. (Indonesia, a
crucial American ally during the cold war, has also been forming defense
ties with China.) As one senior Malaysian diplomat put it to me, without
a hint of jest, "Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the
brown but not the white". Tellingly, it is Vietnam, because of its
violent histories with the US and China, which is most eager to accept
American defense contracts (and a new Intel microchip plant) to maintain
its strategic balance. Vietnam, like most of the second world, doesn't
want to fall into any one superpower's sphere of influence.

The Anti-Imperial Belt

The new multicolor map of influence - a Venn diagram of overlapping
American, Chinese and European influence - is a very fuzzy read. No more
"They're with us" or "He's our SOB". Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia's
Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new
standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the US they are its friend
while busily courting all sides.

What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form
anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and
diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran
to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to
construct Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the
Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to
Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also
increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth
trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying
first-world corporations and markets. The United Arab Emirates
(particularly as represented by their capital, Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia
and Russia are rapidly climbing the ranks of foreign-exchange holders
and are hardly holding back in trying to buy up large shares of Western
banks (which have suddenly become bargains) and oil companies.
Singapore's sovereign-wealth fund has taken a similar path. Meanwhile,
Saudi Arabia plans an international investment fund that will dwarf Abu
Dhabi's. From Switzerland to Citigroup, a reaction is forming to limit
the shares such nontransparent sovereign-wealth funds can control,
showing just how quickly the second world is rising in the global power
game.

To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a
second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other
countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization;
in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy
faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to
secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of
globalization second-world countries' state-backed firms either
outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend
for themselves. The second world's first priority is not to become
America but to succeed by any means necessary.

The Non-American World

Karl Marx and Max Weber both chastised Far Eastern cultures for being
despotic, agrarian and feudal, lacking the ingredients for
organizational success. Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that
mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western
ideals neither transferable nor relevant. Today the Asian landscape
still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people
and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world.
With or without America, Asia is shaping the world's destiny - and
exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the
process.

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West
has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an
American gravity - pro or anti. As Europe's and China's spirits rise
with every move into new domains of influence, America's spirit is
weakened. The EU may uphold the principles of the United Nations that
America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own
social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why
should China or other Asian countries become "responsible stakeholders",
in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's words, in an
American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when
the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward
multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and
playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium - that the world
inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must
be accepted as the basis of global order - has paradoxically resulted in
America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a
geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success
for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic
growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western
modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a
century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure
that the West would dominate forever - materially or morally. Despite
the "mirage of immortality" that afflicts global empires, the only
reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and
as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee
of power is down.

The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America
unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal
democratic ideals - which Europe may now represent better than America
does - but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and
China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the
perennial center of gravity of geopolitics. When America dominated NATO
and led a rigid Pacific alliance system with Japan, South Korea,
Australia and Thailand, it successfully managed the Herculean task of
running the world from one side of it. Now its very presence in Eurasia
is tenuous; it has been shunned by the EU and Turkey, is unwelcome in
much of the Middle East and has lost much of East Asia's confidence.
"Accidental empire" or not, America must quickly accept and adjust to
this reality. Maintaining America's empire can only get costlier in both
blood and treasure. It isn't worth it, and history promises the effort
will fail. It already has.

Would the world not be more stable if America could be reaccepted as its
organizing principle and leader? It's very much too late to be asking,
because the answer is unfolding before our eyes. Neither China nor the
EU will replace the US as the world's sole leader; rather all three will
constantly struggle to gain influence on their own and balance one
another. Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a
path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China
will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and
mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay
in the game.

I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with
transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely
unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the
United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind.
Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations
(as in Bali in December) - and need to see more of in the areas of
preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states - is a far
greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete
burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric
but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security
Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither
are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted
voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the
Big Three to sort out among themselves.

Less Can Be More

So let's play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task
is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from
the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse
governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of
the past decade's policies - those that inspired defiance rather than
cooperation - and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that
lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the US?

First, channel your inner JFK. You are president, not emperor. You are
commander in chief and also diplomat in chief. Your grand strategy is a
global strategy, yet you must never use the phrase "American national
interest". (It is assumed.) Instead talk about "global interests" and
how closely aligned American policies are with those interests. No more
"us" versus "them", only "we". That means no more talk of advancing
"American values" either. What is worth having is universal first and
American second. This applies to "democracy" as well, where timing its
implementation is as important as the principle itself. Right now, from
the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world -
including its democracies - is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps
what we want for them - always. Neither America nor the world needs more
competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if
they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude
must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is
what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to
be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed
to do.

Second, Pentagonize the State Department. Admiral William J Fallon, head
of Central Command (Centcom), not Robert Gates, is the man really in
charge of the US military's primary operations. Diplomacy, too, requires
the equivalent of geographic commands - with top-notch assistant
secretaries of state to manage relations in each key region without
worrying about getting on the daily agenda of the secretary of state for
menial approvals. Then we'll be ready to coordinate within distant
areas. In some regions, our ambassadors to neighboring countries meet
only once or twice a year; they need to be having weekly secure
video-conferences. Regional institutions are thriving in the second
world - think Mercosur (the South American common market), the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Gulf Cooperation
Council in the Persian Gulf. We need high-level ambassadors at those
organizations too. Taken together, this allows us to move beyond, for
example, the current Millennium Challenge Account - which amounts to
one-track aid packages to individual countries already going in the
right direction - toward encouraging the kind of regional cooperation
that can work in curbing both terrorism and poverty. Only if you think
regionally can a success story have a demonstration effect. This
approach will be crucial to the future of the Pentagon's new African
command. (Until last year, African relations were managed largely by
European command, or Eucom, in Germany.) Suspicions of America are
running high in Africa, and a country-by-country strategy would make
those suspicions worse. Finally, to achieve strategic civilian-military
harmonization, we have to first get the maps straight. The State
Department puts the Stans in the South and Central Asia bureau, while
the Pentagon puts them within the Middle-East-focused Centcom. The
Chinese divide up the world the Pentagon's way; so, too, should our own
State Department.

Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic
corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers
and Chinese teachers - all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called
marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning
loyalty. There are currently more musicians in US military marching
bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by
Congress's decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings.
In this context, Condoleezza Rice's "transformational diplomacy" is a
myth: we don't have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone
solo hardship missions. We need a Peace Corps ten times its present
size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job
training overseas - with corporate sponsorship.

That's right. In true American fashion, we must build a
diplomatic-industrial complex. Europe and China all but personify
business-government collusion, so let State raise money from Wall Street
as it puts together regional aid and investment packages. American
foreign policy must be substantially more than what the US government
directs. After all, the EU is already the world's largest aid donor, and
China is rising in the aid arena as well. Plus, each has a larger
population than the US, meaning deeper benches of recruits, and are not
political targets in the present political atmosphere the way Americans
abroad are. The secret weapon must be the American citizenry itself.
American foundations and charities, not least the Gates and Ford
Foundations, dwarf European counterparts in their humanitarian giving;
if such private groups independently send more and more American
volunteers armed with cash, good will and local knowledge to perform
"diplomacy of the deed", then the public diplomacy will take care of itself.

Fourth, make the global economy work for us. By resurrecting European
economies, the Marshall Plan was a down payment on even greater returns
in terms of purchasing American goods. For now, however, as the dollar
falls, our manufacturing base declines and Americans lose control of
assets to wealthier foreign funds, our scientific education, broadband
access, health-care, safety and a host of other standards are all
slipping down the global rankings. Given our deficits and political
gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian,
liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and
technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the
pack. Globalization apologizes to no one; we must stay on top of it or
become its victim.

Fifth, convene a G-3 of the Big Three. But don't set the agenda; suggest
it. These are the key issues among which to make compromises and
trade-offs: climate change, energy security, weapons proliferation and
rogue states. Offer more Western clean technology to China in exchange
for fewer weapons and lifelines for the Sudanese tyrants and the Burmese
junta. And make a joint effort with the Europeans to offer massive,
irresistible packages to the people of Iran, Uzbekistan and Venezuela -
incentives for eventual regime change rather than fruitless sanctions. A
Western change of tone could make China sweat. Superpowers have to learn
to behave, too.

Taken together, all these moves could renew American competitiveness in
the geopolitical marketplace - and maybe even prove our exceptionalism.
We need pragmatic incremental steps like the above to deliver tangible
gains to people beyond our shores, repair our reputation, maintain
harmony among the Big Three, keep the second world stable and neutral
and protect our common planet. Let's hope whoever is sworn in as the
next American president understands this.

_____

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy
Program of the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from his
book, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,
to be published by Random House in March.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all


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