Wall Street Journal - December 27, 1999
The Outlook
WASHINGTON - For two decades, those who called the 20th century "the American century" have assumed that the 21st belongs to someone else.
Harvard Prof. Ezra Vogel started the trend with his 1979 book, "Japan as Number One." Historian Paul Kennedy marked its apogee a decade later with "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers." And even today, Harold Evans writes in the introduction to his coffee-table book, "The American Century," that "the British dominated the 19th century, and the Chinese may cast a long shadow on the 21st."
But the truth is, the U.S. enters the 21st century in a position of unrivaled dominance that surpasses anything it experienced in the 20th. Coming out of World War II, the U.S. may have controlled a larger share of world output; but, it also faced threats to its security and its ideology. Today, those threats are gone, and the nation far outstrips its nearest rivals in economic and military power and cultural influence. America's free-market ideology is now the world's ideology; and the nation's Internet and biotechnology businesses are pioneering the technologies of tomorrow.
"We are now controlling the essential language in which the basic formulas for the future are being worked out," says Richard Rosecrance, author of "The Rise of the Virtual State" and one of the few commentators who predicted an American resurgence a decade ago. "We seem to be setting the norms that other states follow."
It's difficult to find another moment in history when a single nation or political entity so dominated world affairs. The Roman Empire, for all its glory, was largely confined to Europe. The nomads of Central Asia, led by warriors like Genghis Khan, spread their influence from Eastern Europe to China in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, but their cultural influence was limited. Even the British Empire, on which the sun never set, didn't have the unrivaled position that America enjoys today.
"There has never been anything quite like this state of the world," says economic historian Nathan Rosenberg.
You'd never guess that if you listened only to the men running for the presidency. Ousted from the White House seven years ago, Republicans see no benefit in making Reagan-like pronouncements about America's brilliance. And Democrats, still suffering from Vietnam hangover and fearful of insulting the disaffected, shy away from triumphalism. "We're worried about hubris," says one adviser to Vice President Al Gore.
But with hubris or not, the next president will begin the new century, and the new millennium, as leader of the greatest nation in the history of the world, and of a nation whose future looks as promising as its past.
Some commentators argue that globalization and technology render such nationcentric analysis irrelevant. What nationality, they ask, is DaimlerChrysler? And what do geographic boundaries matter in a world where digitized information circles the globe in seconds?
But the Internet entrepreneurs who talk of obliterating time and distance are themselves the best proof that geography still matters. How else to explain the fact that they crowd together into Silicon Valley or along Boston's Route 128? And front-page stories about the millennial plans of Algerian terrorists to attack American revelers is a sure sign that nationality still looms large in the minds of many.
"I really think that national differences are still going to matter in the next century," says economist David Landes, author of "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations."
If so, then the real challenge for the 21st century will be figuring out how to manage a world in which one nation so clearly dominates. Henry Kissinger, who gained prominence for his analysis of the balance of power, is equally thoughtful in talking about the current imbalance.
"This is something we never conceived we would have to face," he says. "When we were historically involved in foreign policy, it was in reaction to a danger, real or perceived." Now, the U.S. faces no single, credible, organized threat in the world. And it's finding that world can be just as difficult, if not more so, as the one that preceded it.
The key, Mr. Kissinger argues, is creating a global community of interest. "There is no example in history," he says, "where a pre-eminent power could maintain itself without having others wanting it to sustain power."
When it comes to creating global community, 1999 was a bust. President Clinton nearly blew an historic opportunity to bring China into the fold last April, when he rejected Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's bid for admittance to the World Trade Organization. Then came the war in Kosovo, which was waged in a way that heightened the world's fears of American hegemony. And finally, there was the debacle in Seattle, at which Mr. Clinton's play for the political sympathies of American labor alienated almost every other nation.
"Now that we stand all alone, what we are managing to do is alienate almost everyone," says James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense and energy. The danger, he says, is that the American people, who like to be loved, won't take well to being the world's target and "will lose interest in the outside world."
Could the 21st century be an American century? For the moment, no other nation comes close to competing for that honor. But the challenges of the next 100 years could prove even more difficult than those of the past.
--ALAN MURRAY