Some will see great compromise on this path, but it is really great consistency. We can re-align ourselves immediately to a world transforming. If we own up to our past, we can command our future. Those thirteen colonies may have begun-quite implausibly-as the world's original anti-imperialist league, but our international libe-ral trade order now encompasses the vast majority of the planet's population. As the world's oldest and most successful multinational economic and political union, we remain the planet's most communicable ideology-its most potent insurgency. We are modern globalization's source code-its DNA. Here America plays a special historical role, not as the only great power-because there are so many great powers at work in this complex world-but as the power with the greatest opportunity either to extend or to sabotage globalization's stunning advance around the planet. The one resource we will never deplete is our collective imagination.īut imagination requires confidence, which both spreads and dissipates with the velocity of a virus.
Some may see only billions of mouths to be fed, but in reality it is billions of minds to be harnessed. For this path to remain sustainable, compromises must be made and great technologies found. This looming achievement will put the planet under great duress in coming decades, much as it once did these United States. We must neither fear nor dismiss them, but encourage their pursuit of happiness, and in doing so, we'll find their main goal is one very familiar to us-the attainment of a middle-class existence. In this world we find no strangers, just younger versions of ourselves, who are prone to all the same sins and manias we once suffered, even as they teach us magnificent new ways to improve our lives and secure our tightly shared future.
THE WORLD AFTER BUSH HOW TO
It's so damn competitive merely because that's our natural habitat we don't know how to make it any other way. Neither accident nor providence, this "flat world" is fundamentally our design-a template of networks spreading, economies integrating, and states uniting. This is still America's world, and if we have the will to step up to the plate, we can make things right-right now.Īmerica's journey back to where we once belonged begins with one simple realization: This is a world of our making. So I won't tell you the critics are wrong-just that their own vision is too limited. When we should have inspired hope, we have stoked fears, and where we should have built bridges, we have erected walls. Wars may be won, but the peace belongs to others-we just have to get used to it.Īnd it is true that in the tumultuous times since 9/11 sent our world spinning that much faster, America has searched for a grand strategic vision to animate our spirit and guide our actions, and it has failed. America is in decline, and the rest of the world has caught up to us. Lately, we are being told that this is no longer our world.
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