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America Tends to Play the Player, While China Plays the Board

The Amazing Economic Ruleset That are These United States

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Table of Contents

GLOBALIZATION'S THROUGHLINES: RESTORING US GLOBAL LEADERSHIP IN A TURBULENT ERA <PREFACE>

Frankenstein’s Monster: Coming to Grips with Our Most Powerful Creation <THROUGHLINE ONE>

• The Empty Throne: Globalization Comes with Rules but No Ruler <Thread 1>
• The Eye-of-the-Storm Fallacy: Americans’ Poor Understanding of Globalization <Thread 2>
• The World at War: Our Successful Downsizing of Conflict Over the Years <Thread 3>
• Cold Wars as Comfort Food: The Pentagon’s Need for a Near-Peer Competitor <Thread 4>
• Nuclear Clubbing: America’s Obsession with Preventing Proliferation <Thread 5>
• State-on-State War in the Post–Cold War Era: How America’s New Rules Come Back to Haunt Us <Thread 6>
• Symmetrizing the Global War on Terror (GWOT): Our Badasses Are Better Than Your Bad Actors <Thread 7>
• America’s New Map: Climate Change as Globalization’s Next Ordering Principle <Thread 8>

Climate Changes Everything: A Horizontal World Made Vertical <THROUGHLINE TWO>

• When Wide Beat Tall: Why Humans See an East-West World <Thread 9>
• Middle Earth Is Doomed! North Integrates South or Faces Its Disintegration! <Thread 10>
• Poleward Bound (I Wish I Were . . .): Climate Change Puts Every Species on the Move <Thread 11>
• Go North, Young Man! The Geopolitical Upside of Climate Change <Thread 12>

Destiny’s Child: How Demographics Determine Globalization’s Winners, Losers, and Future <THROUGHLINE THREE>

• The Golden Ticket: Cashing In a Demographic Dividend Is Hardly Guaranteed <Thread 13>
• The Secret History of Globalization: Follow the Demographic Dividend <Thread 14>
• Globalization’s Prime Directive: Accommodate Peacefully Rising Economic Pillars <Thread 15>
• The Dorian Gray of Great Powers: By Staying Young(ish), America Stays Relevant <Thread 16>
• America’s 50/50/50 Journey: From 1950 to 2050, Whites Fall to Less Than 50 Percent of Population <Thread 17>
• Making America Great Again: Drunk on Nostalgia, We’re on a Road to Nowhere <Thread 18>

Superpower Brand Wars: The Global Middle Seeks Protection from the Future <THROUGHLINE FOUR>

• It’s Not Personal, It’s Strictly Business: Superpowers Compete to Revise Global Rules <Thread 19>
• National Affiliation Does Not Grow out of the Barrel of a Gun: Irredentism as Superpower Brand Failure <Thread 20>
• Stuck in the Middle with You: When the Middle Class Is Happy, Everybody’s Happy <Thread 21>
• Go, China. Go! Beijing’s Methodical Approach to Geopolitics <Thread 22>
• One Belt to Rule Them All, One Road to Find Them, One Initiative to Bring Them All and Infrastructure Bind Them <Thread 23>
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Is Asia Big Enough for Both Rising India and Risen China? <Thread 24>
• Leave the Gun, Take the Biometrics: How China and America Project Power Differently <Thread 25>
• Pacification by Gamification: Ruling the World One Cowed Citizen at a Time <Thread 26>
• Sensor Chip Meets Censorship: China’s 5G Telecom Offering Is a Trojan Horse <Thread 27>

Globalization’s Consolidation Is Hemispheric Integration: America’s Goal of Stable Multipolarity Preordained This Era <THROUGHLINE FIVE>

• Nations in the Cloud: Globalization’s Digitalization Meets Cyber Sovereignty <Thread 28>
• The World in Three Vertical Slices: Why America Should Choose the Door Marked “West” <Thread 29>
• In Globalization, Demand—Not Supply—Is Power: So, the Biggest Markets Command the Most Power <Thread 30>
• Strength in Numbers: America Does Not Stack Up Well Against the Competition <Thread 31>
• You Will Be Assimilated, Resistance Is Futile: America Is Finally Forced to Join Its Own Neighborhood <Thread 32>
• The Geopolitics of Belonging: The EU’s Model of Political Integration Works <Thread 33>

The West Is the Best: Our Hemisphere Is Advantageously Situated for What Comes Next <THROUGHLINE SIX> 

• Energy Independence Ain’t All It’s Fracked Up to Be, but It’s Why the United States Stopped Obsessing over the Middle East <Thread 34>
• Water, Water Everywhere but Not Enough to Drink: Why Tall Now Beats Wide <Thread 35>
• The West Feeds the Rest: Climate Change Elevates Food Security to National Security <Thread 36>
• Global Value Chains Regionalize Amidst Superpower Brand Wars: America Disregards This at Its Peril <Thread 37>
• West Hem Civ 101: Having Outgrown Our Parentage, the Americas Stand Tall <Thread 38>
• Nobody Does It Better: These United States as Globalization in Miniature <Thread 39>
• Winning the Twenty-First Century: Citizenship Is About Identity, and Identity Is About to Change <Thread 40>
• The Climate Redemption: Get Busy Adding Stars or Get Busy Losing Them <Thread 41>
• We’re Still the One: The Durability of America’s Superpower Brand Appeal <Thread 42> 

The Americanist Manifesto: Summoning the Vision and Courage to Remap Our Hemisphere’s Indivisible Future <THROUGHLINE SEVEN>

• Thesis: American Acceptionalism <Thread 43>
• Antithesis: American Apartheid <Thread 44>
• Synthesis: Mil Millones Americanos <Thread 45>

AN AMERICAS-FIRST GRAND STRATEGY: CROWDSOURCING THE RIGHT STORY, CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATHS <CODA>

PREFACE

Globalization’s Throughlines: Restoring US Global Leadership in a Turbulent Era

I could say that America is at a turning point, but that would disguise a darker truth—namely, that we are at a turning-back point. Too many of us choose to resist the future and escape the present by retreating into the past. This hardly makes us unique. Many economic powers facing decline reject reinvention, instead embracing the fantasy of recapturing lost greatness by scapegoating “evil” internal forces deemed responsible for this “treasonous” outcome. And if democracy is hollowed out by this viciousness? That just tees up the authoritarian reboot.

The politically inexpedient truth is this: America has spent the last seven decades systematically promoting a liberal international trade order whose cross-border flows of goods, services, technologies, investment, migrants, information, and entertainment have methodically integrated the world’s major economies, creating profound levels of interdependence among nations, peoples, and cultures—what we now call globalization (Throughline One). Our goal was simple: preventing world wars through increasingly inclusive economic advance. America was fantastically successful in this world-shaping grand strategy, globally creating more wealth and reducing more poverty across those seven decades than had occurred in the previous five centuries.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new world order emerged with America as sole superpower, a situation that naturally invited Washington’s overreach on its unilateral policing of regional crises. Our nation wisely remedied that imbalance by encouraging the peaceful rise of other great powers—most notably China. In the meantime, Washington vigorously wielded its unmatched power, toppling nefarious dictators, disrupting transnational terror networks, and radically speeding up globalization’s advance. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, our citizenry correctly perceived that America’s success in encouraging the rise of numerous economic powers had significantly diminished our ability to steer global developments. At this point, China and other rising economies helped sustain globalization’s transformation into an increasingly digitalized phenomenon defined less by the flow of goods than by services and content, giving lie to simplistic notions of de-globalization.

Even in the post–Cold War era, America’s grand strategy remained phenomenally successful, enabling the emergence of a majority global middle class long thought impossible. Now, because the bulk of humanity spends a growing share of its income on things beyond the bare necessities, the world enters an age of superabundance matched by super-consumption. That unprecedented achievement has turbo-charged three global dynamics that, in their daunting combination, caused Americans to recoil from our glorious creation (globalization) and demonize it as the cause of all our problems.

There is no denying globalization’s role in spiking these global crises, but we must reject the hindsight that their emergence invalidates America’s strategy of encouraging globalization’s poverty-eradicating advance. We made the world an infinitely better place that now faces new challenges. Who can argue that humanity’s economic betterment should have been denied—despite these costs?

The first of these tectonic forces set into motion by skyrocketing global consumption is accelerating climate change (Throughline Two), which, like globalization, began reshaping the planet soon after America took it upon itself to steer the world’s development following two world wars. Climate change now remaps the planet, tragically rendering much of Middle Earth—my term for the lower latitudes extending 30 degrees north and south of the equator—systematically unable to sustain, without outside assistance, their exploding populations, national economies, and ultimately their political systems. Climate change is also creating enormous new areas of economic opportunity across the North. Accommodating this vast poleward transfer of natural wealth—to include all manner of species and peoples—will test humanity’s ingenuity and empathy like no global dynamic before it. 

The second force is the global demographic transition (Throughline Three) stunningly accelerated by globalization’s rapid integration of Asia, home to over half of humanity. Our species will collectively age across this century in a manner totally at odds with both nature and human history: the old surpassing the young in nation after nation. That demographic transformation will factor heavily in the superpower struggles now unfolding. Youth-bulging powers tend to be warlike and unstable (recall America’s violent 1960s), while elderly societies retreat into nostalgia and social rigidity (see Japan and Italy today). Even nations achieving a large middle class succumb to virulent bursts of nationalism (China and India already). The good news? There are ways to avoid extreme aging, and America is supremely endowed with such capacity. We just need a bigger Union and a new map to that destination.

The third of these global forces arises in how the first two dynamics—climate change and demographic transformation—will collide across this century (Throughline Four). That collision will dramatically redefine Middle Earth’s economic needs and political priorities, and the superpowers (US, European Union [EU], China, India, Russia) that most effectively meet those needs and address those priorities will see their global influence radically expand. In responding to Middle Earth’s increasingly dire plight, these five powers will invariably compete in propagating new models of North-South security, economic, and political integration. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have openly voiced such ambitions, imagining their own new maps. India’s minister of external affairs has declared his nation’s duty to serve as champion of the Global South on climate change and economic development. Washington, swept up in its political infighting, seems dimly aware of a competition already begun.   

America’s economic future is on the line here: Much of the world’s consumer growth will be concentrated across Middle Earth, meaning the race to integrate North and South will simultaneously constitute a superpower brand war—an avowedly ideological competition to prove which economic model of trade and development best preserves and expands the global middle class amidst climate change’s destabilizing impact. Capturing the political allegiance of that ascendant middle class will determine which superpower’s definition of global stability reigns supreme in the decades ahead. If America wants to possess both power and influence in this remapped future, it cannot sit out this contest obsessively guarding its borders.

We have long framed superpower competition as which side (East or West) captures more of the other side’s players. In the future, we will define it as which Northern power most comprehensively integrates its respective South—ameliorating its climate-induced decay and preventing its virtual absorption by competitors. This new superpower competition will define our era, either seeding a second American Century or launching some other (Chinese? Indian?). No matter which superpowers prevail, regional and hemispheric integration will flourish (Throughline Five). This tightening of supply chains represents less a de-globalization than an optimization of material trade befitting the rise of multiple competing consumer blocs across the global economy. A generation ago, Asia manufactured goods for the rest of the world. Now, it manufactures largely for itself. On its own, this positive development has triggered a remapping of global value chains—an absolute good generating regional trade efficiencies. In this next iteration of globalization, those superpowers accumulating the most demand power will rule global consumer tastes in a way America once did—and now faces losing.

In this century, superpowers will prevail not according to the millions they field as lethal soldiers but the billions they attract as loyal subscribers. Size matters in this struggle to shape globalization’s future, which means America will be disadvantaged compared to far more populous China and India. These United States will be greatly incentivized to grow their ranks—as they have long done—by integrating hemispheric neighbors. By scaling its demand power, a once-again expanding American Union can constitute an economic center of gravity of equal or superior attractiveness to the global middle class whose brand loyalty we seek.

Rest assured, come midcentury, we will all be living in somebody’s world. I simply prefer our map over China’s for reasons I will make eminently clear.

To our great good fortune, America’s position as the dominant economic power of the Western Hemisphere clearly advantages us for the North-South integration to come (Throughline Six). Our true West enjoys several natural resource advantages over the far more crowded, diverse, and historically conflicted Eastern Hemisphere. The Americas also share culture and civilization worth defending on their own merits. By capitalizing on these advantages, America stands to benefit environmentally by managing climate change’s harsh equatorial impact, as well as economically by adding Latin America’s middle-class consumer power to that of North America. That larger union, however achieved, will then be able to extend its rule-setting power to significant portions of the Eastern Hemisphere, merging with regions not wholly lost to China or India’s economic orbits. For now, consider the entire board in play.

I understand why any call for hemispheric integration feels an inconceivable reach from where we stand domestically today, but our current bout of nativism and xenophobia highlights the powerful pull of this very path (Throughline Seven). In other words, what we now fear most is that which we sense is inevitable. Like comedy (tragedy plus distance), conceivability emerges with enough pain and time. With Central America’s environmental refugees already stressing our southern border, America is just beginning to feel Latin America’s pain on climate change. 

I likewise understand the instinct to wish away the problem of climate refugees by insisting that technological solutions can spare us this path, but this book purposefully focuses on adaptation versus any such direct responses, which I stipulate will be made and will succeed to some extent—just not fast enough to forestall the global dynamics explored here.

Thankfully, we do not start from scratch. After all, America started out as a baker’s dozen of independent colonies. Today, hemispheric integration is likewise achievable through mechanisms and approaches already employed by both the EU in the political realm and China in the economic realm. Both carefully crafted integration schemes ultimately target security integration—the ability of superpowers to defend and optimally police their chosen spheres of influence. Meanwhile, America, lost to its intergenerational culture wars, satisfies itself with limp efforts to revitalize and extend military alliances focused on containing Chinese expansionism—a defensive and reactionary strategy more appropriate to retrograde Russia than the forward-leaning, world-shaping superpower we have long been.

Americans are modern globalization’s original networkers, wiring the world in our wake. By nature, we are a revolutionary force offering nations increased connectivity to all manner of economic opportunity and disruptive content. China and Russia, by comparison, offer control—namely, a model and means for national governments to surveil their growing middle-class ranks, restrict their access to disruptive content, and aggressively thwart their inconvenient tendency toward democracy.

This is where our national infighting becomes self-destructive: the world is watching how America navigates a future where our leadership is not a given, nor our ideals naturally preeminent. We witness Americans increasingly resenting—even as we increasingly resemble—a globalization originally made in our image but now no longer with our likeness. We ran this show for decades, but our success in creating this world cost us control over it—by design. Now, with climate change fueling the poleward movement of all life, globalization’s churning of races, species, and microbes lies beyond anyone’s control. 

That intimidating reality transforms America’s global leadership while reaffirming its enduring source. Our nation has been—and always will be—a petri dish of globalization’s evolution. These United States remain the world’s source code for both integration (our immigrant nation’s fabled melting-pot dynamic) and disintegration (our institutional racism and chronic culture wars). We are globalization-in-miniature—its de facto proof of concept. America does not take its political cues from the likes of Hungary. 

Americans do not endure history; we make it. This is our true superpower: reliably re-setting our internal rules in response to history’s punishing waves of change, and then spreading those new and better rules across the world. American grand strategy does not merely confront rivals but shapes a global environment that tames their—and our—worst impulses. We are the best thing to ever happen to our world.

Russia and China aggressively market their competing rulesets, exploiting vulnerable trade partners who distrust and dislike them. Yet both regimes, as internally brittle as they are, currently outpace America’s half-hearted attempts at global leadership. How is this so? It is because the stories we now tell of globalization do not envision a happy ending, much less a way ahead. No surprise there: when creators abandon their creation, monsters abound.

My task here is to propose that happy ending, one avowedly cast from an American perspective. Your task, as reader, is to maintain an open mind as to its feasibility and desirability. If, as our politicians love to proclaim, America’s best days lie ahead, then we citizens cannot merely await that future but must craft its story lines—both foreign and domestic. Given our truly revolutionary achievements, we must not allow our currently flat trajectory to determine the upper bounds of our ingenuity and ambition, both of which the world desperately needs now. 

As such, this book is all about unearthing globalization’s throughlines and their constituent threads, operationalizing—through storytelling—that navigational knowledge across America’s political leadership, business community, and citizenry. Throughlines are those persistent national and global drivers that Americans will confront, balance, and trade off as we manage the national and global challenges laid out here. Think of them as history’s guardrails forcing us down a plausible range of pathways—certain inevitabilities that compel us to consider some version of the inconceivables we must in years ahead embrace. As for the connecting threads parsed within each throughline, consider them our protagonist’s inner dialogue about the fork-in-the-road decisions lying before us. Now, more than ever, the world needs America to stay in character—my overriding purpose in writing this book.

Let our storytelling begin, for therein we discover the contours of America’s new map.