Despite the interpretation some may place on the title, this is not an
anti-American book. It is, in my opinion, a cogent and eminently readable argument
that the geopolitical power balance in the world is now entering a new
phase—one is which America is no longer the sole, reigning superpower. A few
lines in the preface well summarize Zakaria’s perspective and final conclusion
in this regard.
The
United States still plays a pivotal role in the world, but it is not what it
once was. … This is not necessarily a sign of weakness or a cause for
lamentations. But it is a new world in which countries will seek their own
solutions and their own path, and the United States will have neither the
economic means nor the political influence to impose a solution.
I can’t pretend to know whether Zakaria is right or wrong. What I will
find fascinating about his prediction is monitoring how much the citizens of the
United States accept it if it begins to prove true. There are vocal elements in
American society that have their view of economic, military, democratic and/or
moral superiority built on the idea that the United States is a singularly
exceptional nation that must always dominate the world. If this proves
factually wrong, will this “America First” crowd be able to accept the new
world Zakaria describes?
It should be interesting. Zakaria says this new world is “not about the
decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” But, I’m
doubtful that this distinction will be noticed or accepted by those who would
prefer to see threats in other countries rising in prominence. They’re so used
to the concept of the zero-sum game. Will they be able to interpret China’s
rise, for example, as anything else than America’s corresponding decline?
Zakaria tries again and again to combat this perspective, knowing, I
think, that he is likely to be misunderstood.
We still
think of a world in which a rising power must choose between two stark options:
integrate into the Western order, or reject it, becoming a rogue nation and
facing the penalties of excommunication. In fact, rising powers appear to be
following a third way: entering the Western order but doing so on their own
terms—thus reshaping the system itself.
It’s an avenue few Americans can perceive. George W. Bush’s patriotic
premise that you’re either “with us or against us” is still very much in the
air, and it’s given a new paint job every election cycle. Few Americans recognize
what Zakaria claims, that…
The world
is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to
post-Americanism.
Americans Live in a Cocoon
Americans have a difficult time seeing the forces that are reshaping
the world around them. They think they understand how the world works—some of them,
in fact, are convinced God has revealed uniquely to them how the world is
supposed to work—but very few of them actually have that kind of vision or
wisdom. They think they’re experts but, increasingly, the rest of the world
doesn’t see things that way.
To
foreigners, American officials seem clueless about the world they are supposed
to be running. “There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the
room and one without,” says Kishore Mahbubani, who was formerly Singapore’s
foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. Because Americans live
in a “cocoon,” they don’t see the “sea change in attitudes towards America
throughout the world.
Zakaria has numerous examples of how the cocoon manifests itself in
United States foreign policy. All are worth reading and understanding, but
here’s a sample.
From before the start of the Iraq War…
The UN inspectors
in Iraq were puzzled by how uninterested U.S. officials were in talking to them
before the war. The Americans, comfortably ensconced in Washington, lectured
the inspectors—who had spent weeks combing through Iraq—on the evidence of
weapons of mass destruction. “I thought they would be interested in our
firsthand reports on what those supposedly dual-use factories looked like,” one
inspector told me. “But no, they explained to me what those factories were
being used for.”
And regarding the world’s reaction to the aftermath of the Iraq War,
which is not based—as it is in America—on whether or not the United States was able
to claim victory…
Even had
Iraq been a glorious success, the method of its execution would have made
utterly clear the unchallenged power of the United States—and it is this
exercise of unipolarity that provoked a reaction around the world.
It doesn’t matter whether America’s intervention in Iraq was a success
or failure. To large portions of the world, the overriding concern is how the
United States took action. Too many American people and their politicians have
yet to realize that they can no longer act unilaterally and expect there to be
no negative repercussions.
And regarding terrorism…
On
terrorism, both [American political] parties continue to speak in language
entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous
effect it has everywhere else.
And generally speaking…
American
politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, sanction, and condemn
whole countries for myriad failings. Over the last fifteen years, the United
States has placed sanctions on half the world’s population. We are the only
country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior.
Washington, D.C., has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world
outside.
Is it any wonder Zakaria predicts the United States is unprepared for a
world in which it is no longer the sole, dominant player? Not that many
Americans care. To them, the United States remains the world’s most
indispensible nation, the one that holds the beacon that all other countries
should follow.
There’s a Reason Why Capitalism
Won the Cold War
I think the thing I like best about Zakaria is the clarity of his
perspective. He has the ability to slice through the bluster and indignation
that drives much of our political rhetoric, and cut the legs off firmly
entrenched positions with fact-based interpretations of reality.
Here’s an example, in response to those who are worried that
fundamentalist Islam has a chance of taking over the world as a primary
governing philosophy.
In
contrast to Soviet socialism or even fascism in the 1930s, no society looks
with admiration and envy on the fundamentalist Islamic model. On the
ideological level, it presents no competition to the Western-originated model
of modernity that countries across the world are embracing.
You realize it’s true in as much time as it takes to read the words.
Communism and fascism were the threats they were because people and governments
espoused them as rational alternatives to Western secularism and capitalism.
But neither of the two rising powers Zakaria profiles in depth—China
and India—feel this way. Each, in their own way, has already embraced
capitalism. India, especially, consciously chose its direction after observing
world events.
In the
minds of India’s policy and intellectual elites, there was a U.S.-led
capitalist model on one end of the spectrum and a Soviet-led socialist model on
the other. New Delhi was trying to carve a middle way between them. In this
respect, India was not unusual. Brazil, Egypt, and Indonesia—and in fact, the
majority of the world—were on this middle path. But it turned out to be a road
to nowhere, and this was becoming apparent to many people in these countries by
the late 1970s. As they stagnated, Japan and a few other East Asian economies
that had charted a quasi-capitalist course succeeded conspicuously, and the
lesson started to sink in.
But the
earthquake that shook everything was the collapse of the Soviet Union in the
late 1980s. With central planning totally discredited and one end of the
political spectrum in ruins, the entire debate shifted. Suddenly there was only
one basic approach to organizing a country’s economy. This is why Alan
Greenspan has described the fall of the Soviet Union as the seminal economic
event of our time. Since then, despite all the unease about various
liberalization and marketization plans, the general direction has not changed. As
Margaret Thatcher famously put it in the years when she was reviving the
British economy, “There is no alternative.”
The fact of the matter is that capitalism won the Cold War. You’d think
Americans would be happy with that outcome, but I wonder how many are concerned
about how well America can compete in the world that it created.
There Is No Such Thing as Asia
Here’s another. As described earlier, Americans are sometimes oblivious
to how skewed their perspective is, how fundamentally premised it is on an
American view of the world around us.
To speak
of the “rise of Asia” misses the point. There is no such thing as Asia, which
is really a Western construct. There are many very different countries that are
part of that construct—China, Japan, India, Indonesia—and they harbor
differences and suspicions about one another. The world looks different to
China and India not simply because of who they are but also because of where
they sit. The great shift taking place in the world might prove to be less about
culture and more about power.
There is no such thing as Asia. Brilliant. How much will you
misunderstand the world if you persist in clumping competing players together
into constructs that don’t exist for them?
It’s a nice introduction to the next major section of his book, where
Zakaria takes an in-depth look at two of the countries he mentions above—China,
which he refers to as the Challenger (as in challenging America for its
superpower status), and India, which he calls the Ally (as in the one with
sensibilities more fundamentally aligned with our own).
The Challenger
To me, this is the most fascinating thing about China.
It is
awkward to point out, but unavoidable: not having to respond to the public has
often helped Beijing carry out its strategy. Other governments enviously
looking on have taken note of this fact. Indian officials like to observe that
their Chinese counterparts don’t have to worry about the voters. “We have to do
many things that are politically popular but are foolish,” said a senior member
of the Indian government. “They depress our long-term economic potential. But
politicians need votes in the short term. China can take the long view. And
while it doesn’t do everything right, it makes many decisions that are smart and
far-sighted.”
I’ve begun arguing for some semblance of this for the United States, as
un-democratic as it may sound, because I believe we are facing some problems—a
comprehensive energy policy, for one, and the ballooning national debt, for
another—which will not and cannot be solved by politicians that stand for
re-election every two, four or six years. We need some other mechanism for
determining and setting long-term strategies.
This is
evident in China’s current push in higher education. Recognizing that the
country needs a better-trained workforce in order to move up the economic value
chain, the central government committed itself to boosting scholarships and
other types of aid in 2008 to $2.7 billion, up from $240 million in 2006.
Officials expanded overall government spending on education, which was a measly
2.8 percent of GDP in 2006, to 4 percent in 2010, a large portion of which is
devoted to a small number of globally competitive elite institutions.
Can you imagine something like that happening in the United States?
Zakaria doesn’t make that comparison, but in talking about the likelihood of
such action in India, he might as well be talking about America.
Such a
focus would be impossible in democratic India, for example, where vast
resources are spent on short-term subsidies to satisfy voters. (India’s elite
educational institutions, by contrast, are under pressure to limit merit-based
admissions and accept half their students on the basis of quotas and
affirmative action.)
There are certainly human rights abuses in China, but Zakaria makes
what strikes me as a cogent point that one of the reasons these autocratic
actions work in China is that they are, ultimately, based on reason, and not
the whims of some super-rich dictator. And Chinese society, through its
philosophical tradition of Confucianism, has a decided bias towards what it
sees as reason.
Early
Enlightenment thinkers celebrated Confucianism for its reliance on reason
rather than on divinity as a guide to human affairs. A thesis developed: While
Europe might be far ahead in scientific and technological progress, China had
“a more advanced ethics,” a “superior civil organization” (based on merit, not
patronage), and a “practical philosophy,” all of which “successfully produced a
social peace and a well-organized social hierarchy.”
In other words, living under a dictator is bad, but there are far worse
dictators than those who act based on reason and who strive for social peace.
It makes for a China that, should the United States choose to view it
as a threat, is a much different threat than any it has faced before. China has
a military, but it typically doesn’t use it to exert its influence around the
world. It works largely behind the scenes, seeking not conflicts, but the
avoidance of conflict. True success, one writer Zakaria quotes says, comes from
manipulating a situation so effectively that the outcome is inevitably in favor
of Chinese interests.
But why should this “asymmetrical strategy” be a problem for an America
casting about in search of a new enemy?
The
United States understands how to handle a traditional military-political
advance. After all, this was the nature of the Soviet threat and the Nazi rise
to power. The United States has a conceptual framework as well as the tools—weapons,
aid packages, alliances—with which to confront such an advance. Were China to
push its weight around, anger its neighbors, and frighten the world, Washington
would be able to respond with a set of effective policies that would take
advantage of the natural balancing process by which Japan, India, Australia,
and Vietnam—and perhaps others—would come together to limit China’s emerging
power. But what if China adheres to its asymmetrical strategy? What if it
gradually expands its economic ties, acts calmly and moderately, and slowly
enlarges its sphere of influence, seeking only greater weight, friendship, and
influence in the world? What if it slowly pushes Washington onto the sidelines
in Asia, in an effort to wear out America’s patience and endurance? What if it
quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant
America? How will America cope with such a scenario—a kind of Cold War, but
this time with a vibrant market society, with the world’s largest population, a
nation that is not showcasing a hopeless model of state socialism or
squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new
challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which
it is largely unprepared.
The prospects don’t fill me with hope. Too often in our world, we see
American politicians continuing to paint modern threats with the brush of the
past (i.e., Saddam Hussein is the new Hitler, China is the new Soviet Union)
because those are frames that Americans understand and to which America’s
political and military might can be applied. But if the United States decides
to fight China—and I personally don’t think it needs to—and it tries to fight
on terms that don’t reflect the true nature of the conflict, how much hope does
it have of winning? And what happens then?
The Ally
To me, this is the most fascinating thing about India.
The
Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri was driven to exasperation by Hinduism’s
complexity. “The more one studies the details of the religion the more
bewildering does it seem,” he wrote. “It is not simply that one cannot form a
clear-cut intellectual idea of the whole complex, it is not possible even to
come away with a coherent emotional reaction.” Hinduism is not really a
“religion” in the Abrahamic sense of the word but a loose philosophy, one that
has no answers but merely questions. The only clear guiding principle is
ambiguity. If there is a central verse in Hinduism’s most important text, the
Rig Veda, it is the Creation Hymn. It reads, in part:
Who
really knows, and who can swear,
How
creation came, when or where!
Even gods
came after creation’s day,
Who
really knows, who can truly say
When and
how did creation start?
Did He do
it? Or did He not?
Only He,
up there, knows, maybe;
Or
perhaps, not even He.
Compare
that with the certainties of the Book of Genesis.
Why is that so fascinating? Because of the impact these beliefs have on
Indian culture and politics. I really like the way Zakaria doesn’t try to
separate religion and belief from culture and politics, the way so much of the
media seems desperate to do. He did the same thing with Confucianism leading to
political action based on reason in China. For India, a belief in Hinduism
means their culture brings an abiding sense of practicality. Indian
businessmen, Zakaria says, can thrive almost anywhere. “As long as they can
place a small idol somewhere in their home for worship or meditation, their own
sense of Hinduism is fulfilled.”
This practical stoicism creates a very different kind of foreign
policy.
It is
clear that Indians are fundamentally more comfortable with ambiguity and
uncertainty than many Westerners, certainly than Anglo-Americans. Indians are
not likely to view foreign policy as a crusade or to see the conversion of
others to democracy as a paramount national aspiration. The Hindu mindset is to
live and let live.
You don’t hear much saber rattling directed at India in the United
States—I don’t think most Americans think of India as any kind of military or
political threat to their foreign policy intentions. But they will make
interesting competitors in the global marketplace of business.
You do hear a lot about the caste system that has shaped Indian society
for hundreds if not thousands of years, and the growing pains their culture
will have to wrestle with—violently or not—as their vast population of
desperately poor and underprivileged begin making their way towards what we
would think of as the middle class. It creates another interesting foil against
what Zakaria sees as an opposite trend in American society, an increasing
separation between our socio-economic classes.
There is
a growing gap between America’s worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class,
on the one hand, and the majority of the American people, on the other. Without
real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America’s competitive edge
and its political future.
I found this section especially compelling, with Zakaria writing it
years before, and me reading it a month after the 2012 presidential election.
Much of Mitt Romney’s political message, seemed keyed towards the business
elite of this country, and I think its failure to connect with the middle class
is an example of the divide Zakaria is talking about.
The Rise of the Rest
But when Zakaria talks about “the rise of the rest,” don’t assume that
he is only talking about the rise of other nations like China and India.
A related
aspect of this new era is the diffusion of power from states to other actors.
The “rest” that is rising includes many non-state actors. Groups and
individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are
being undermined. Functions that were once controlled by governments are now
shared with international bodes like the World Trade Organization and the
European Union. Nongovernmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue
in every country. Corporations and capital are moving from place to place,
finding the best location in which to do business, rewarding some governments while
punishing others. Terrorists like Al Qaeda, drug cartels, insurgents, and
militias of all kinds are finding space to operate within the nooks and
crannies of the international system. Power is shifting away from
nation-states, up, down, and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional
applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less
effective.
I personally find this trend fascinating. Nation-states—and, I think,
America most of all—will have a very difficult time adapting to a playing field
in which non-state actors have significant power and influence. Look at the
constitutional knots the United States has had to twist itself into in order to
combat Al Qaeda and global terrorism. Nations will have to rewrite their own rulebooks
to compete in this space, and risk alienating the base of their power—the
consent of the governed—in the process.
Americans are at a significant disadvantage on this front, because their
identity is inexorably linked to their status as a nation-state. They go out of
their way to talk about their unified vision as Americans. But many other
people in the world come from cultures that have far older ways of organizing
their allegiances. Zakaria cites numerous examples of religious, ethnic, and
linguistic communities within nation-states that command far greater loyalty
among their members than the nation-state they supposedly belong to. As these
non-nation-state communities grow in power and influence, America will continue
to have a difficult time understand their needs and motivations.
Nationalism
America faces other disadvantages in this post-American world, most of
them tied to perspectives that were shaped by its past.
Nationalism
has always perplexed Americans. When the United States involves itself abroad,
it always believes that it is genuinely trying to help other countries better
themselves. From the Philippines and Haiti to Vietnam and Iraq, the natives’
reaction to U.S. efforts has taken Americans by surprise. Americans take
justified pride in their own country—we call it patriotism—and yet are
genuinely startled when other people are proud and possessive of theirs.
This strikes me as a wholly accurate description—and again it’s
something that results from the view most Americans have of America as the
world’s most exceptional country. Americans are raised inside a bubble of
self-congratulatory superiority, and most of them come to believe that America
is indispensible to the world and unfailing right in its actions.
Even the history books reinforce this.
Russians
have long chafed at the standard narrative about World War II, in which Britain
and the United States heroically defeat the forces of fascist Germany and
Japan. Given mainstream U.S. historical accounts, from Stephen Ambrose to Ken
Burns, Americans could be forgiven for believing that Russia played a minor
part in the decisive battles against Hitler and Tojo.
But are those stories true?
In fact,
the eastern front was the central arena of World War II. It involved more land
combat than all other theaters of the war put together and resulted in thirty
million deaths. It was where three-quarters of all German forces fought and
where Germany incurred 70 percent of its casualties. The European front was in
many ways a sideshow, but in the West it is treated as the main event. As the
writer Benjamin Schwarz has pointed out, Stephen Ambrose “lavishes [attention]
on the U.S.-British invasion of Sicily, which drove 60,000 Germans from the
island, but completely ignores Kursk—the largest battle in history, in which at
least 1.5 million Soviets and Germans fought, and which occurred at exactly the
same time. … [M]uch as it may make us squirm, we must admit that the struggle
against Nazi Germany…was primarily, as the great military historian John
Erickson called it, ‘Stalin’s war.’”
In fact, here’s a tidbit I just can’t pass up. Put this in your
“Alternate History of World War II” file:
World War
II was the final nail in the coffin of British economic power. (In 1945,
American GDP was ten times that of Britain.) Even then, however, Britain
remained remarkably influential, at least partly because of the almost
superhuman energy and ambition of Winston Churchill. When you consider that the
United States was paying most of the Allies’ economic costs, and Russia was
bearing most of the casualties, it took extraordinary will for Britain to
remain one of the three major powers deciding the fate of the postwar world.
The photographs of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Yalta Conference in
February 1945 are somewhat misleading. There was no “big three” at Yalta. There
was a “big two” plus one brilliant political entrepreneur who was able to keep
himself and his country in the game, so that Britain maintained many elements
of great powerdom well into the late twentieth century.
Makes you wonder how much America in 2013 is like Britain in
1943—desperately losing a war and looking for powerful allies to lift the heavy
burdens of victory off its shoulders so it can position itself as the kingmaker
in the new world order. The problem with the comparison is that when Britain
looked around in 1943, it saw Russia and America willing to help. In 2013, who
will America find when it looks around for help? Or better posed, will it even
look around?
Modernization
Another intriguing issue—and one where the perception of Americans may
be increasingly at odds with the rest of the planet—is the question of whether
or not Modernism is exclusively a Western phenomenon. Zakaria argues, for
example, that as India shook off its Western colonizers and began to make its
own way in the world, its leaders specifically steered away from the Western
democratic and capitalistic systems. What followed was years of stagnation and
poverty. Now that it embraces them, growth and prosperity are in abundance, and
they are taking on many of the trappings of Western culture as a result. But…
The issue
that non-Western reformers were struggling with in the twentieth century has
returned as a central question for the future: Can you be modern without being
Western? How different are the two? Will international life be substantially
different in a world in which the non-Western powers have enormous weight? Will
these new powers have different values? Or does the process of becoming rich
make us all the same?
My own belief is that becoming rich makes people of different cultures
similar, but not the same. All increasingly wealthy people will acquire better
things and nicer places to live, but they will each bring the idiosyncrasies of
their culture with them and, placing great importance on them, will leverage more
and more resources for them.
And some people agree with me.
Some
contemporary scholars, most famously Samuel P. Huntington, have argued that
modernization and Westernization are wholly distinct. The West, Huntington
argues, was Western before it was modern. It acquired its distinctive character
around the eighth or ninth century but became “modern” only around the
eighteenth century. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization,
urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The
qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical
legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law,
civil society. “Western civilization,” Huntington writes, “is precious not
because it is universal but because it is unique.”
Yeah. What he said.
Think about it. Would an industrialized, urbanized, highly literate and
wealthy society that rises out of one the Islamic cultures across the
non-industrialized world necessarily develop any of the things Huntington
mentions? And if not, how many Americans would view such a society as alien and
corrupt—as anti-modern despite many of the trappings of modernization it would
possess and leverage for its own cultural aims?
All Is Not Lost
But, in the final analysis, as I said at the very start, this is not an
anti-American book. Although Zakaria certainly calls them like he sees them:
We have
not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world—and a
good part of the nonindustrialized world as well—has better cell phone service
that the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial
world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands
sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are
constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from
other countries’ health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans
ignore the fact that a third of the country’s public schools are totally
dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American
litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing
business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for
housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to
support home ownership. Except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain,
and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States.
We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that
“we’re number one.”
He also recognizes the substantial benefits America has given the
world.
For all
its abuses of power, the United States has been the creator and sustainer of
the current order of open trade and democratic government—an order that has
been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of humankind.
And in noting this influence that the United States has had on the
world, Zakaria notes what might be its final irony.
Generations
from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the
early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its
great and historic mission—it globalized the world. But along the way, they
might write, it forgot to globalize itself.
If America is to adapt to the post-American world Zakaria describes,
however, there are some fundamental changes that must be made. And they may not
be of the kind you would think.
As it
enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak
economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional
politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with—about
225 years old—has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist
media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate
about trivia—politics as theater—and very little substance, compromise and action.
A “can-do” country is now saddled with a “do-nothing” political process,
designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure—the
growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending—the political
process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three
decades.
To me, this is the essential point in understanding how to respond to the
challenges that the future is bringing. America is not facing an economic
crisis, nor a demographic one. It is facing a political crisis and, as such, it
will require a political solution.
But good luck trying to provide it from within.
Those who
advocate sensible solutions and compromise legislation find themselves
marginalized by the party’s leadership, losing funds from special-interest
groups, and being constantly attacked by their “side” on television and radio.
The system provides greater incentives to stand firm and go back and tell your
team that you refused to bow to the enemy. It’s great for fund-raising, but
it’s terrible for governing.
The political solution must come from without, not within, the current
system. Is that a third party? Ultimately, I think not. Although a credible
third party may open up some new thinking on some of America’s entrenched
problems, it will inevitably become as corrupt as the other two and, if
successful, would likely supplant one and return the system to two-party rule.
I don’t know how to do it, but somehow we have to decouple some of the
momentous decisions that must be made from the political process itself. Not
because we think our current politics will make the wrong decision—but because
our current politics refuses to make any decision at all.
Let’s end with some of Zakaria’s most thought-provoking questions.
The real
test for the United States is political—and it rests not just with America at
large but with Washington in particular. Can Washington adjust and adapt to a
world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shifts in economic and
political power? This challenge is even more difficult in foreign policy than
in domestic policy. Can Washington truly embrace a world with a diversity of
voices and viewpoints? Can it thrive in a world it cannot dominate?