Article 4.
Cato Institute
The Rest Won't Overcome the West
Leon Hadar
July 1, 2011 -- Much has been said and written in recent years about the growing challenge to US geo-strategic and geo-economic status by China, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the other rising global powers, including South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey. Indeed, in the aftermath of the US military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially since the financial meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession, small-time pundits as well as renowned futurologists have been predicting that the West is basically kaput and that the rest of the Twenty-First Century belongs to the 'Rest’. In this scenario, China replaces the US and the global hegemonic power sooner or later. As we study these America-is-finished-and-China- rules-the-world forecasts, it is important to recall that not so long ago many of the same pundits and futurologists were anticipating that globalisation and the Internet would lead to the collapse of the nation- state and the end of the business cycle, or that the US would dominate a unipolar international system and bring about the triumph of democracy and free markets worldwide.
That many of the same experts who were celebrating US triumphalism in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First Gulf War have now been transformed into the prophets of American gloom and doom, should encourage us to embrace a certain sense of scepticism about the notion that China and the rest of the Rest are about to take charge and that Washington will turn out to be nothing more than a tourist attraction for Chinese and Indian tourists in the coming years.
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