"Well Duh!" was my response when I first read that sentence. Still though, the only world I've ever known is the one where we are the biggest, strongest kid on the block. The thought of us not being a dominant global force is actually kind of scary, even though I realize that, as of late, we have been using our powers for evil rather than for good. A part of me still longs for the American that I felt we were when I was growing up: you know, the good guys. Sigh.
Here's what Slate's Fed Kaplan has to say about the Report:
Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council--the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.
The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:
The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players--similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century--will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.
In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"--probably the single most powerful country--but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"--not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others--will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.
Hey! Kind of like we do with them! Only the idea of China making us play by their rules is pretty freakin' scary. I mean, after that whole Tianamen Square "incident."
America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war--far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."
To the extent that these new powers seek others to emulate, they may look to the European Union, not the United States, as "a model of global and regional governance."
And more bad news for the economy:
This shift to a multipolar world "will not be painless," the report goes on, "and will hit the middle classes of the developed world in particular" with further outsourcing of jobs and outflow of capital investment. In short, the NIC's forecast involves not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but also--as these things do--a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.
Read the whole Slate article HERE