Informed Speculation

Here’s Francis Fukuyama in the Los Angeles Times:

IT IS EASY TO GET very discouraged when surveying the state of the world. Few Americans need to be reminded about the chaos in Iraq, Iran’s ambitions as a regional and potentially nuclear power or the possibility of Sunni-Shiite conflict spreading throughout the Persian Gulf.

But there’s also the fact that Russia has been regressing politically, using its energy wealth to muscle Belarus and Western oil companies that invested in it, while using gangster-style tactics to silence critics at home and abroad. Nationalism is resurgent in Northeast Asia, with younger generations of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans at each other’s throats over wrongs committed more than half a century ago. This in turn blocks cooperation over the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

In our hemisphere, anti-American populists have been elected in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, and are busy centralizing power and reversing the trend of the 1990s toward openness and economic integration. Around the world, authoritarian regimes are learning repression from one another. What political scientist Samuel Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization began in the 1970s with Spain and Portugal, spread through Latin America and Asia, and culminated in the collapse of communism. But this wave has clearly crested. Not wanting to see another democratic upsurge like Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Russia, Egypt, Syria and Venezuela have all passed laws closing off international funding for pro-democracy groups.

Underlying these worrisome trends is a huge decline in the prestige of the American model, which since the Iraq war has come to be symbolized less by the Statue of Liberty than by the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

The world’s evident instability has led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move the hands of its “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight, two minutes closer to the figurative end of civilization. Even the fact that hundreds of millions of people are pulling themselves out of poverty lays the groundwork for global warming.

And all in this in an article meant to extol optimism!  Read it all…Fukuyama makes some good points, and while I disagree with some of them, his overall message is sound: we’re overly pessimistic in the West in general and America in particular:

For all of its stumbles in the last few years, the United States remains a rich and powerful country, with plenty of margin to absorb setbacks and make up for mistakes. The large part of the world that is modernizing successfully is dependent on us for continued progress, and perhaps for that reason is far less anti-American than those regions mired in conflict and stagnation. There are real risks out there today, but it may help to take a deep breath and assess calmly where we stand. Terrorists use the tools they do because they are weak and have no others. Americans need to remember that we are the 800-pound gorilla: We have choices, but we need to take care when we throw our weight around.

Now quit reading about politics and go watch some football!…