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All motion is relative: It's been said that what we're seeing is not so much the decline of the West, as it is the rise of the rest. That might make some of u
by dctoedt 13y ago
All motion is relative: It's been said that what we're seeing is not so much the decline of the West, as it is the rise of the rest.
That might make some of us feel bad here in the U.S. --- we're no longer the undisputed top dogs in the world, as we were post-WWII --- but (to put it mildly) it's not entirely a bad thing for our fellow human beings in non-U.S. countries to be enjoying a higher standard of living than they had before.
The essence of "Americanism," it seems to me, is a desire to do better, for ourselves and our posterity (to paraphrase the preamble of the U.S. Constitution). That's not a quality unique to the U.S., of course, but we put a lot of emphasis on it. The mere existence of the linked article, and those like it, suggests we haven't entirely lost that quality; we shouldn't begrudge it when other countries and cultures "win" as well.
EDIT, responding to @waps: This issue is orthogonal to the question of how order can be maintained while still preserving peace, prosperity, and liberty. If there's an alternative to a light-touch military dominance by the U.S. and its allies, I'm not aware of it.
- waps 13y agoThere is just the tiny problem of what the military world order China will support (although I'm thankful it's not the middle east). This seems to me a pretty serious problem, and frankly the reason they will not stay the biggest for long. But it's going to hurt everyone, just like it did before. People forget what history looked like before the "pax Americana", because it's lasted more than a generation now. Even before that there was the colonial "peace" (compared to what came before it, it certainly was peaceful, compared to after, maybe not so peaceful), so even the pre-baby-boomer generation does not really remember what was the norm of history before WWI. Let's just hope it'll all be different this time. That China will not do what it did in the early medieval times. That either the middle east will not reunite, or that it somehow will act differently this time. That the Russian situation does not resume the cold war (which wasn't all that cold in Eastern Europe as plenty of Americans know first-hand). There is the strategic theory that there has been peace because of the superpowers. Let's just hope that that is very wrong, and that it can survive 3 or 4 superpowers.
- hga 13y agoLook up the volume of world trade before WWI, and just how long it took to get back up to that level. Much, much later than you'd think. Looking the results of the of the infinitely more brutal Pax Romana should give anyone pause at the prospect of the end of the Pax Americana.