> Behalf Of K.Feete
> Kat Feete
> We still win in creativity though, right? Right?
Kat, if you're curious about the position of the United States on the
international hierarchy, my thesis research made me something of an
expert on the topic :-) Quoting from William Wohlforth's (Prof. of
political science at Dartmouth College) article entitled "The
Stability of a Unipolar World" in International Security Vol. 24, No.
1 (Summer 1999) pgs. 5-41. International Security, btw, enjoys a
prestige in political science sort of like, oh, Physical Review in the
hard sciences:
"The United States enjoys a much larger margin of superiority over the
next most powerful state or, indeed, all other great powers combined
than any leading state in the last two centuries. Moreover, the
United States is the first leading state in modern international
history with decisive preponderance in _all_ the underlying components
of power: economic, military, technological, and geopolitical." (pg.
7)
In 1997 if the United States GDP is assigned the value of 100, that of
the historical Great Powers would have the values:
Britain - 16. Russia - 5. Japan - 50. Germany - 25. France - 17.
China - 10.
For military expenditure, on the same scale:
Britain - 13. Russia - 26. Japan - 17. Germany - 14. France - 17.
China - 13.
"The US combination of quantitative and qualitative material
advantages is unprecedented, and it translates into a unique
geopolitical position." (pg. 17)
As of 1995, if you chose total (civilian and military) R&D
expenditures with the _world_ total as 100, the percent spent by major
nations is:
US - 53. Britain - 6. Japan - 22. France - 8. Germany - 11. China
and Russia are both below 1%. (pg. 19)
Note that both of these figures probably vastly _understate_ American
preeminence, as the US has other advantages shared by no other
country - incredible dominance of global "mindshare", a system of
bases and allies in every corner of the globe, the _lowest_ national
debt as a percentage of GDP of any of the G-7 countries, and the best
demographics of any of the G-7 countries (that is, the largest
population, the fastest-growing population, and the only country with
a population that is not, in fact, aging rapidly - there is no
counterpart to the "Baby Boom Echo" in Europe or Japan, where
populations are actually shrinking instead of rising.) All of this
means that the margin of American power superiority over any other
nation in the world is larger than the above figures suggest. The
demographic figures make it virtually certain (because demography is
destiny) that this margin will _increase_ significantly with time.
Kat, you complain about the ignorance of most Americans about the rest
of the world, particularly compared with the rest of the world's
knowledge abou the US. Could I suggest an explanation for that? The
relationship between the United States and any other country in the
world is asymmetric. We matter more to them than they do to us.
That's not a product of arrogance - it's a statement of fact, and if
you want to talk about the real world, you need to understand that
power asymmetry as the single most important factor in explaining the
politics of the world today. A British professor - I can't recall his
name offhand - described the United States today as a 500 foot tall
golden retriever. It sort of wanders through the world with a big
smile on its face and good intentions in its heart, not really
realizing that the friendly wags of its tail tend to start small
hurricanes. Americans know little about other countries because other
countries have little effect on them. The reverse is very obviously
not the case. Now, there's little doubt in my mind that the above
listing of what are, in the end, factually true statements, will be
interpreted as arrogance by some people on the list. There is not, in
the end, anything I can do about that. I'm sorry about it, but
there's nothing I can do about it. The sheer omnipresence of American
power and the fact that fairly trivial actions by the United States
have major - often unintended - consequences in the rest of the world
will create that perception, regardless of what we do. Combine that
with the fact that, in my opinion, most of the nations of Europe have
intellectual climates still shaped by the time when European _empires_
ruled over most of the planet, and the natural resentment of the
nation that has not only supplanted them in this dominant position but
has rejected empires as immoral and turned down the opportunity to
create one of its own, and a great deal of resentment of American
arrogance is the inevitable otucome.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
