Power Shifts, Old and New

Wednesday’s NY Times had a good essay by Thomas Friedman on the current evolution of the global distribution of power. He argues that there are actually three shifts taking place:

The first shift is due to our “oil addiction”:

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy…

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

The second main shift isn’t so much about our self-imposed weakness due to oil consumption, but the rise of other states due to the changes in their societies. Friedman cites to Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Post-American World:

Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm…

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”

The third shift, described in David Rothkopf’s book Superclass (see Peter’s take on it here) describes the rise in power of

a small group of players — “the superclass” — a new global elite, who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.

Some of this new elite “are from business and finance,” says Rothkopf. “Some are members of a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists. Some are masters of new or traditional media; some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”

None of this is especially new. Think of the fears of the rise of OPEC in the 1970’s or the discussion of American relative decline in the 1980’s (spurred, in part, by the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and more generally by the economic rise of Japan) and even Friedman’s own essays on “super-empowered individuals” in the 1990’s.

Noting that these ideas are not new is not to criticize Friedman. To the contrary, he recognizes that simply because some issues fall in and out of vogue (oil dependency, for example) does not change the fact that they affect global power day in and day out. Each of these three trends played a role in the distribution of power in decades past and they continue to do so today. Besides looking for what is new in international politics, it is important to reiterate the fundamentals. Especially if they still have not been addressed in any meaningful sense by policymakers.