A New World?

For obvious reasons, most people are focused on the danger the financial crisis poses to their vital private interests. But some commentators, looking at the larger picture, argue that the long-predicted end of American dominance (and the advent of a multipolar world) has now begun with a vengeance. John Gray writes in The Observer :

Having created the conditions that produced history’s biggest bubble, America’s political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

Perhaps I read Gray’s piece with a jaundiced eye, but I think there is a strong note of unseemly glee in his analysis. It’s hard to sort out insight from wishful thinking when people with pronounced antipathy to the U.S. predict disaster.

But still, Gray is a thoughtful and perceptive man who may well be right. And it is indeed worrying that America’s leaders seem wholly unprepared for the future he foresees.