EUA: a industria do declinismo de novo assanhada... - Marcos Troyjo (FSP)

EUA em declínio?

Marcos Troyjo
Folha de S.Paulo, 14/02/2014

O peso dos EUA no cenário global está diminuindo? A questão segmenta os que vislumbram declínio ou aumento da importância relativa do país no mundo.

"Declinistas" apontam que, em 1950, os EUA representavam metade do PIB mundial, contra apenas 20% hoje. Em 2023, observaremos um eclipse em que a China converte-se na maior economia do planeta. Nos últimos meses, o país asiático já superou os EUA como maior nação-comerciante (resultado atingido pela soma total em dólares de exportações e importações).

No campo político-militar, embora os EUA sejam a única potência capaz de intervenção com forças convencionais em qualquer lugar do planeta, sua máquina de guerra encontra-se em fadiga. Oneroso legado humano, político e orçamentário da "Guerra ao Terror" e suas impopulares investidas no Afeganistão e no Iraque.

Pior, a ausência de mandatos negociados na ONU, bem como a rede de bisbilhotagem eletrônica voltada também a parceiros tradicionais, fragilizaram a influência de Washington. No âmbito do soft power, os EUA desfalcaram-se do argumento moral  a sustentar onipresença geopolítica. Um gigante cínico, não uma "superpotência benigna".

Já os "relativistas" entendem que, embora já tenham respondido por fatia percentualmente maior do PIB mundial, os EUA são mais centrais do que nunca. A ascendência do FED sobre as finanças globais não tem paralelo. O atual escarcéu com eventuais inflexões mais bruscas da política de estímulos monetários bem o provam.

A revolução do xisto altera dramaticamente a conta custo-benefício do fator energia no mundo.  Neste ano os EUA provavelmente superarão a Rússia como maior produtor mundial de petróleo & gás. A China já compra mais barris de países-membros da OPEP do que os EUA. Para quem então o Oriente Médio passa a ser mais estrategicamente vital?

Os EUA são o principal motor da negociação para mega-acordos econômicos no Atlântico e no Pacífico.  Em termos de inovação, lideram ao articular capital, ciência e empreendedorismo no desencadeamento de novos ciclos econômicos.

Daí surgem tecnologias disruptivas orientadas a lucros civis e dianteira militar. Os drones são bom exemplo. Por um lado, podem precipitar revolução na logística, como vem experimentando a Amazon.  Por outro, alteram a própria natureza de operações militares no ar. Muitos sugerem que o caça F35, hoje estado-da-arte em termos de sofisticação, talvez seja a última aeronave de combate a depender de um piloto humano em seu cockpit.

Essa combinação de “desengajamento” em certos temas e regiões com o avanço de tecnologias passíveis de aplicação militar retira o foco da questão do declínio. Debate mais relevante é o da "metamorfose" do papel dos EUA, pois parece convidar Washington a uma política global menos “presencial”.

Com a emergência de novas potências e a retração de suas (autoimpostas) responsabilidades globais, tudo indica que os EUA não serão hegemônicos. Não haverá uma Pax Americana. Gostemos ou não, aguarda-nos contudo um cenário em que, ao lado de importantes coadjuvantes, os EUA terão o papel de protagonistas.    

mt2792@columbia.edu

O mito do declinio americano - Josef Joffe (book review)

Reigning Heavyweight

‘The Myth of America’s Decline,’ by Josef Joffe

Christoffer Caldwell,

Tne New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 22/12/2013

Vice president Joe Biden was wrong when he said, at last year’s Democratic Convention, “It’s never been a good bet to bet against the American people.” In fact, claiming that America is going to hell in a handbasket has been among the more reliable routes to both the Oval Office and the best-seller lists. Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, points out in his new book, “The Myth of America’s Decline,” that the United States has been dogged for much of its history as a superpower by warnings of doom.

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Jan Bajtlik

THE MYTH OF AMERICA’S DECLINE

Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies

By Josef Joffe

327 pp. Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

These warnings have mostly proved groundless. When, in 1960, John F. Kennedy told his fellow citizens that they were on the wrong end of a “missile gap,” the United States actually had thousands of nuclear missiles while the Soviet Union may have had as few as four. In the 1980s, Paul Samuelson’s canonical textbook, “Economics,” still assumed that the Soviet economy would outstrip America’s, and in 1987 the Yale historian Paul Kennedy warned of American “imperial overstretch” — yet it was the Soviet empire that soon collapsed. As the 1990s approached, the Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz predicted that Japan would surpass America; Japan soon began a two-decade economic nose-dive.

Such half-forgotten political controversies are important, as Joffe sees it, because arguments for America’s decline are being made once again. The late economist Robert Fogel, the consultant Kishore Mahbubani and the journalists Martin Jacques, Parag Khanna and Fareed Zakaria — these and others see the United States losing ground to China, to China and India, or to “the rest” more generally. Still, Joffe’s real target is not particular individuals but a certain genre of book about the “rise of” this or that Asian nation, the think-tank studies that support such views and the development models they tend to extol, with their reliance on peasant migration to factories, currency manipulation, protectionism and state-sponsored “tsunamis of cheap capital.”

Joffe, an eager neologist, calls these models “modernitarianism.” He grants that China has advantages that Japan and earlier “tiger” economies lacked. Its reserve army of labor is bigger. And it has a large military. But Joffe is not impressed. Demographically, China is at risk of stagnation, with ever more dependent retirees and ever fewer people of working age. And the United States, with a war budget of around $700 billion (excluding spending on veterans), still accounts for over 40 percent of world military spending. Even if we assume a doubling of China’s $100 billion military budget, slow demographic growth “will not soon enable the Middle Kingdom to unseat the greatest military power the world has ever seen.”

Nor can China match the United States in education. It can send its promising young scientists to top American universities. But most foreigners who get Ph.D.’s in science and engineering in this country tend to stay at least five years, Joffe says, including 92 percent of Chinese and 81 percent of Indians (a striking statistic that helps explain this book’s strong pro-immigration bias). Whether you measure by entrepreneurship or by research and development, China has been unable to develop a free-standing tech culture. Contrary to predictions of government-led innovation being a “way station” on the road to a free-market economy, the share of state enterprises in the Chinese economy has grown in recent decades. Meanwhile, the share of Chinese-built parts in the high-tech products it assembles and exports has fallen.

The attentive reader will notice we are half a world away from Joffe’s ostensible subject. Joffe never really gets around to disproving, or even addressing, the case that the United States is in decline, as most of his readers will understand the word. What concerns him is strategic decline, relative to America’s economic and military competitors. As such, he scarcely touches upon America as a society — and thus has little time for those theories of decline that stress decadence, deindustrialization and malaise. Once he knows the final score, he’s not so interested in reading an account of the game, or an assessment of whether there is dissension in the clubhouse.

He does mention our “dysfunctional government, polarized parties, inequality of incomes and wealth, ballooning entitlements, pork and patronage, strained infrastructures.” But this observation comes too late — more than 200 pages into a short book — to sound like anything other than a perfunctory “to be sure” clause. And Joffe often seems more intent on the mote in China’s eye than the beam in America’s, adding that “a one-party regime faces problems of a different magnitude.” In the closing paragraphs of the book, Joffe paraphrases a presentation by a Chinese scholar who is impressed with America’s intellectual, cultural and military power, but sees the country as being in political, economic and social crisis. For Joffe, the remarks show America is “the Decathlon power . . . ahead in most, but not all, disciplines.”

In a way, this book belongs to the very declinist genre it aims to debunk — except that its skepticism is directed at Asia. Its perky prose style demonstrates that it is possible to wear one’s erudition a bit too lightly. Joffe never lingers long enough on a point to do more than drop a few wisecracks. Antic language and exuberant mixed metaphors (“Britain’s American heir is keeping a larger bundle of arrows in the quiver, ranging from longstanding alliances via à la carte commitments to over-the-horizon balancing with mobile forces”) leave the impression that he is writing for people who need to be cajoled into reading.

Joffe gives no indication that he thinks the recent economic and political crises require us to re-examine assumptions about America’s position in the world. He writes, for instance, that one cause of today’s difficulties “is cyclical, the trillion-dollar toll levied on the economy since the Crash of 2008, the birth of Decline 5.0.” That this crisis is an ordinary “cyclical” one is open to debate. And if it is not cyclical, then to mock the pessimists is to speak too soon. In mentioning the historian Edward Luttwak’s lament that a run-down United States was “acquiring the necessary third-world traits of fatalistic detachment,” Joffe writes, “This was in 1992, on the cusp of America’s longest boom, which extended all the way to 2007.” Similarly, when citing the philosopher John Gray’s warning in 1994 that interethnic strife was leading to “ungovernability” and a “spectacle of American decline,” he notes that this was “two years into the longest American expansion.”

Dismissing Luttwak ought to require figuring out whether what we experienced between 1992 and now actually was genuine prosperity, or whether it was something carried out with accounting tricks, borrowed money and legal chicanery, as well as by two unrepeatable demographic windfalls that exaggerated the economy’s true productivity (first, the baby boom passing through its productive years; second, mass immigration). And before writing off Gray, Joffe, who sees irresponsible deficit financing as one of the most ominous signs for America’s future, ought to consider that one of the things deficits purchase is social peace.

“Only the United States can do in the United States,” Joffe writes. He is right, certainly. But not all countries with the means to thrive have the wisdom to do so. As Adam Smith said in 1777, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But probably not so much as Joffe thinks.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.

O mito do declinio americano - Walter Russell Mead

• OPINION
• The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2012, 6:37 p.m. ET

Walter Russell Mead: The Myth of America's Decline

Washington now has added China, India, Brazil and Turkey to its speed-dial, along with Europe and Japan. But it will remain the chairman of a larger board.

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The world balance of power is changing. Countries like China, India, Turkey and Brazil are heard from more frequently and on a wider range of subjects. The European Union's most ambitious global project—creating a universal treaty to reduce carbon emissions—has collapsed, and EU expansion has slowed to a crawl as Europe turns inward to deal with its debt crisis. Japan has ceded its place as the largest economy in Asia to China and appears increasingly on the defensive in the region as China's hard and soft power grow.

The international chattering class has a label for these changes: American decline. The dots look so connectable: The financial crisis, say the pundits, comprehensively demonstrated the failure of "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have sapped American strength and, allegedly, destroyed America's ability to act in the Middle East. China-style "state capitalism" is all the rage. Throw in the assertive new powers and there you have it—the portrait of America in decline.

Actually, what's been happening is just as fateful but much more complex. The United States isn't in decline, but it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer suffice for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead.

From the 1970s to the start of this decade, the world was in what future historians may call the Trilateral Era. In the early '70s, Americans responded to the defeat in Vietnam and the end of the Bretton Woods era by inviting key European allies and Japan to join in the creation of a trilateral system. Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. accounted for an overwhelming proportion of the international economy in the noncommunist world. With overlapping interests on a range of issues, the trilateral powers were able to set the global agenda on some key questions.

Currency policy, the promotion of free trade, integrating the developing world into the global financial system, assisting the transition of Warsaw Pact economies into the Western World—the trilateralists had a lot to show for their efforts.

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Corbis

The system worked particularly well for America. Europe and Japan shared a basic commitment to the type of world order that Americans wanted, and so a more cooperative approach to key policy questions enlisted the support of rich and powerful allies for efforts that tallied pretty closely with key long-term American goals.

It is this trilateral system—rather than American power per se—that is in decline today. Western Europe and Japan were seen as rising powers in the 1970s, and the assumption was that the trilateral partnership would become more powerful and effective as time passed. Something else happened instead.

Demographically and economically, both Japan and Europe stagnated. The free-trade regime and global investment system promoted growth in the rest of Asia more than in Japan. Europe, turning inward to absorb the former Warsaw Pact nations, made the fateful blunder of embracing the euro rather than a more aggressive program of reform in labor markets, subsidies and the like.

The result today is that the trilateral partnership can no longer serve as the only or perhaps even the chief set of relationships through which the U.S. can foster a liberal world system. Turkey, increasingly turning away from Europe, is on the road to becoming a more effective force in the Middle East than is the EU. China and India are competing to replace the Europeans as the most important non-U.S. economic actor in Africa. In Latin America, Europe's place as the second most important economic and political partner (after the U.S.) is also increasingly taken by China.

The U.S. will still be a leading player, but in a septagonal, not a trilateral, world. In addition to Europe and Japan, China, India, Brazil and Turkey are now on Washington's speed dial. (Russia isn't sure whether it wants to join or sulk; negotiations continue.)

New partnerships make for rough sledding. Over the years, the trilateral countries gradually learned how to work with each other—and how to accommodate one another's needs. These days, the Septarchs have to work out a common approach.

It won't be easy, and success won't be total. But even in the emerging world order, the U.S. is likely to have much more success in advancing its global agenda than many think. Washington is hardly unique in wanting a liberal world system of open trade, freedom of the seas, enforceable rules of contract and protection for foreign investment. What began as a largely American vision for the post-World War II world will continue to attract support and move forward into the 21st century—and Washington will remain the chairman of a larger board.

Despite all the talk of American decline, the countries that face the most painful changes are the old trilateral partners. Japan must live with a disturbing rival presence, China, in a region that, with American support, it once regarded as its backyard. In Europe, countries that were once global imperial powers must accept another step in their long retreat from empire.

For American foreign policy, the key now is to enter deep strategic conversations with our new partners—without forgetting or neglecting the old. The U.S. needs to build a similar network of relationships and institutional linkages that we built in postwar Europe and Japan and deepened in the trilateral years. Think tanks, scholars, students, artists, bankers, diplomats and military officers need to engage their counterparts in each of these countries as we work out a vision for shared prosperity in the new century.

The American world vision isn't powerful because it is American; it is powerful because it is, for all its limits and faults, the best way forward. This is why the original trilateral partners joined the U.S. in promoting it a generation ago, and why the world's rising powers will rally to the cause today.

Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. His blog, Via Meadia, appears at the American Interest Online.

A version of this article appeared April 9, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Myth of America's Decline.

Declinio americano: de volta a uma velha fabula...

Por vezes, fábulas se realizam... talvez não da forma esperada, ou no momento esperado, mas um dia a "coisa" chega...

Think Again: American Decline
This time it's for real.
BY GIDEON RACHMAN
Foreign Policy, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011

"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."
This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.

Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.

China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.

And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.

"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."
Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."

But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing, doubling in size roughly every seven years.

Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.

Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its imperial ambitions.

In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter what obstacles lie in its path.

"America Still Leads Across the Board."
For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets. The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost. For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all that), its values, the increasing universality of the English language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.

All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.

As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes, and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.

Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures, but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card. Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single largest threat to U.S. national security.

Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly. The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S. and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region -- the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's backyard.

"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."
Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually synonymous.

Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-friendly, and democratic."

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."

There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.

In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."

In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.

And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.

"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."
Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage."

But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor, remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the win-win world.

And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.

In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.

At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff. Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders, particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil, which is driving up global prices.

American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are inevitably emerging.

The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.

O Partido Comunista Frances: 90 anos e desaparecendo...

Uma história que se aproxima do fim, sem glória e sem honra...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Le Parti communiste, nonagénaire sans avenir
Editorial - Le Monde, 27.12.2010

Dans la nuit du 29 au 30 décembre 1920 naissait le Parti communiste français. Au terme de débats fiévreux, le vote décisif du congrès de Tours était sans appel : 3 208 délégués approuvaient l'adhésion à l'Internationale communiste, créée par Lénine, à Moscou, un an auparavant ; 1 022 délégués seulement préféraient, avec Léon Blum, garder la "vieille maison" socialiste.

S'il mérite le respect dû aux nonagénaires, il faut bien dire que le PCF a connu des anniversaires plus glorieux. Et pour cause. Après avoir dominé la gauche française pendant près d'un demi-siècle, entre les années 1930 et 1970, après avoir constitué un pôle majeur de la vie politique nationale, le PCF décline inexorablement depuis. Comme le notait sans fard L'Humanité, en annonçant les deux journées discrètes de commémoration organisées les 11 et 12 décembre, "le Parti communiste français ne prétend plus depuis longtemps incarner une avant-garde autoproclamée du mouvement ouvrier".

Le contraire serait surprenant. Premier parti de France au lendemain de la guerre (28,6 % des voix aux élections de novembre 1946), encore soutenu par un électeur sur cinq jusque dans les années 1970, le PCF n'a connu, depuis, qu'une longue dégringolade électorale. Il a touché le fond lors de l'élection présidentielle de 2007 : Marie-George Buffet, alors secrétaire générale, n'a recueilli que 700 000 voix, soit 1,9 % des suffrages, loin derrière le candidat trotskiste, Olivier Besancenot.

En trente ans, le parti a également perdu les trois quarts de ses adhérents (officiellement 100 000 cartes, dont 60 000 à jour de cotisation) et la plupart de ses parlementaires (17 députés élus en 2007).

Incapable de prendre la mesure des transformations profondes de la société française, le PCF est également en panne de base sociale et il a perdu l'essentiel des relais qui ont longtemps fait sa force. Le "parti de la classe ouvrière" ne l'est plus : 4 % seulement des ouvriers ont soutenu Mme Buffet en 2007. La CGT, ancienne "courroie de transmission" syndicale, a pris ses distances depuis dix ans. Quant aux villes et aux "banlieues rouges" du communisme municipal, elles ne sont guère qu'une survivance : le Parti communiste ne dirige plus que 28 villes de plus de 30 000 habitants (contre 72 il y a trente ans).

Enfin, privé de modèle de référence depuis la disparition de l'Union soviétique au début des années 1990, le PCF est, à l'évidence, en panne de stratégie. Ses hésitations à l'approche de l'élection présidentielle de 2012 en témoignent : ou bien il se contente d'être une force d'appoint du Parti socialiste, en espérant sauver ainsi ses derniers bastions ; ou bien il accepte l'OPA que Jean-Luc Mélenchon entend faire sur ses dernières troupes, ce qui revient à remettre son sort entre les mains d'un tribun venu du PS.

Dans les deux hypothèses, on voit mal le PCF capable de "relever le défi d'un nouveau siècle d'émancipation", comme l'y invitait récemment son nouveau secrétaire général, Pierre Laurent. Sombre alternative. Pour ne pas dire impasse totale.

Article paru dans l'édition du 28.12.10