Even without counting the Olympics, the past few weeks have seen some major blows to American preeminence internationally. First, Europe passed North America as the wealthiest region on Earth:
The crisis is transforming the global map of the world's wealthiest people, with Europe nudging out North America as the richest region, according to a new report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report, titled "Delivering on the Client Promise: Global Wealth 2009," is being released today.
Global wealth fell from $104.7 trillion in 2007, measured in assets under management (AuM), to $92.4 trillion in 2008 -- a decline of 11.7 percent. It was the first decline since 2001(1).
-- The steepest decline was in North America, where wealth plummeted by 21.8 percent last year
North America first passed Europe all the way back in 1919, right after World War One.
Also, a group of countries, led by Gulf states by including some ostensible allies, are working on replacing the dollar is the currency for trading oil:
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Apparently, the Iraq war is transforming the region. (Update: Per lord_mike in the comments, this story might be bogus and unfounded.)
Perhaps most telling of all, immigrants don't even seem to want to come to America anymore:
After nearly 40 years of recorded increases, the number of immigrants living in the United States remained flat between 2007 and 2008, recent statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau show.
According to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the U.S. foreign-born population represented about 12.5 percent of the population in 2008, down from 12.6 percent in 2007.
A downturn in immigration of this magnitude hasn't happened since the Great Depression.
Finally, the world is now looking to China for a consumer spending based economic recovery, not the United States:
In the past, yanking the world economy out of the doldrums has been the job of American consumers, who have accounted for about two-thirds of U.S. gross domestic product and who for years bought enough imports to keep factories running from southern China to northern Mexico to central Europe. But as debt-laden American consumers tighten their belts, some officials hope that Chinese consumers will loosen theirs.(...)
So the government has been stoking the economy not only with big infrastructure projects, but also with incentives for things like new television sets. Mortgages are cheap and plentiful. Morgan Stanley estimated that, using conservative projections, China's total consumer spending will surpass that of the United States by 2018.
In the first seven months of the year, vehicles sold in China reached 12.3 million on an annualized basis, exceeding the United States for the first time ever, according to Morgan Stanley.
It is starting to look like American preeminence internationally will last for an even shorter period than expected. Part of me is pretty bummed by this, while another part of me considers things like country rankings abstractions that benefit neither the people in the dominant country nor those outside of it.
Either way, it does depress me that we didn't do more with our post-Cold War position of international dominance than we did. There was a lot of potential for good, but instead we mainly pressed ahead with an unsustainable economic model that crashed the world economy and brought us closer to the brink on climate change. What where our great national works from 1991-2008? Wars like Iraq and trade agreements like NAFTA unfortunately, seem to be about it. What a wasted opportunity.
Update: In the comments, AliceDem points out that the greatest achievement of the United States in the post-Cold War era is actually the Internet (or at least, releasing it to the world). I think that is right. That makes me feel a lot better, as the Internet is perhaps the greatest cultural work of all time. |
