[UPDATE, Feb. 5, 2008: WSJ's Bret Stephens critiques this essay]
Today's New York Times Magazine has a provocative cover image and essay by Parag Khanna, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (headed by Steve Coll, former WashPost managing editor and South Asia expert). "Who Shrank the Superpower" says:
Just a few years ago, America's hold on global power seemed unshakeable. But a lot has changed while we've been Iraq - and the next president is going to be dealing with not only triumphant China and a retooled Europe but also the quiet rise of a "second world."
[Am trying to recall the last South Asian byline on the cover of this magazine - anyone know? saja[at]columbia.edu, please)
The essay is adapted from Khanna's book, “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,” to be published by Random House in March.
Khanna is director of the New America Foundation's Global Governance Initiative, leading "an effort to find innovative strategies for governmental, corporate, and civil society collaboration to resolve pressing global problems and redefine diplomacy for the 21st century."
Other details from his bio:
Parag Khanna is an expert on geopolitics, global governance, and Asian and European affairs, and was most recently the Global Governance Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He has worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, where he specialized in scenario and risk planning, and at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he conducted research on terrorism and conflict resolution. He holds bachelors and masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and is completing his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He speaks German, Hindi, French, Spanish, and basic Arabic. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, Policy Review, Foreign Policy, Prospect (U.K.), Slate, and Survival (U.K.), and he has been featured on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera International, National Public Radio, and Doordarshan.
E-mail: khanna[at]newamerica.net
Some highlights that have South Asia connections in Khanna's piece, which opens with a future scenario:
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 30 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.
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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. I.P.O.’s 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.
<snip>
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 E.U. 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.
<snip>
But Chávez’s challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
In December 2007, the NYT Magazine had a short item about Khanna and his book. From Second-World Solidarity by Scott L. Malcomson:
The second world used to mean the Soviet Union and its dependencies. Khanna has appropriated it (in his coming book of the same name) for countries that have substantial economies but do not belong to the Big Three. Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria, Russia, possibly India and South Africa — it’s the most successful members of the old nonaligned movement, more or less, plus resource barons, and when you add them all up it amounts to a good chunk of the world. The U.S., the E.U. and China court them — even depend on them — for vital resources and to adjust their own balance of power.
Malcomson also mentions Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria:
Ultimately, the second-world idea augurs an international community that accommodates a high level of competitive tension and a low level of political (or “values”) consensus on how best to govern domestically or cooperate internationally. In Fareed Zakaria’s phrase, the world we’re entering will be “post-American,” though not necessarily anti-American. The post-World War II tension between East and West would then resolve itself into not the victory of the first world but the uneasy equilibrium of a second.
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