Foreign Affairs Is Interesting

If you've ever done any reading about it, it's not hard to be convinced that GDP is a useless measure of an economy's health. But, reading an article in Foreign Affairs really hit that lesson home, albeit not deliberately:

Consider that the United States continues to lead other developed countries in economic growth, technological innovation, productivity, research and development, and the ability to cultivate human talent.

Despite serious problems such as swelling trade and fiscal deficits, illegal immigration, inadequate health care, violent crime, major income disparities, a declining educational system, and a deeply divided electorate, the U.S. economy is healthy: last year, U.S. GDP grew an estimated 4.4 percent, and this year the growth rate is expected to be 3.5 percent, much greater than the corresponding figures for the eurozone (2.0 percent and 1.6 percent). Barring an unexpected sharp economic downturn, the size of the U.S. economy as a proportion of the global economy is likely to increase in the years to come.

-Wang Jisi, "China's Search For Stability With America", Foreign Affairs, (Sep/Oct 2005)

First off, consider that logic - despite numerous social ills - including laughable health care, ironically - the US economy is described as healthy. Bizarre.

But note the final sentence - the US's proportion of world GDP is going to... increase? The sentence is a bit vague, but this is obviously impossible, certainly over anything more than the immediate future - China and India combined are almost as large, GDP-wise, as the US. Throw in Japan and it's definitely larger. In any case, China and India's economic growth will almost certainly continue to erode America's percentage of world GDP. This isn't a bad thing, just a statistical fact.

The US's percentage of world GDP has been declining, long-term, since 1945 where the US alone made up half of world economic activity. Even in the best-case scenario, we can only expect this to continue. In the real best case (and probably impossible) scenario, the rest of the world would enjoy a standard of living more or less equal to America's, giving the US... 5% of world economic activity, exactly what their population would suggest. This is hardly a bad thing. Though I wonder if Americans would agree with that?

There are further problems with the article.

DESPITE ITS many advantages, the United States is not invincible. The war in Iraq, for example, resulted in international isolation of a sort that Washington had not faced since the beginning of the Cold War. The invasion was strongly condemned by people all over the world and explicitly opposed by the great majority of nations. Washington split with many of its traditional allies, such as Paris and Berlin, which refused to take part in the operation. And tensions with Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, increased dramatically....

Nonetheless, the points in common between these powers and the United States in terms of ideology and strategic interests outweigh the differences. A pattern of coordination and cooperation among the world's major powers, institutionalized through the G-8 (the group, of leading industrialized countries), has taken shape, and no great change in this pattern is likely in the next five to ten years. To be sure, some of the differences between the United States and the EU, Japan, Russia, and others will deepen, and Washington will at times face coordinated French, German, and Russian opposition, as it did during the war in Iraq. But no lasting united front aimed at confronting Washington is likely to emerge.

Honestly, I'm not sure if this is correct. If another Republican is elected in 2008 (please God no) I think the rest of the world is going to continue the process of balancing against Washington. It's worth remembering that, sad to say, there are three... more... years of the Bush Administration. Given how badly they fucked up relations with allies in the first three years, how much worse can it get?

One of the major accomplishments of US foreign policy in 2003 was to drive a deep wedge between Washington and it's European allies. Interestingly, this has long been an objective of Russian (and before, Soviet) grand strategy. Fascinating that Bush has succeeded where Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin all failed. Hopefully (and I say this sincerely) Bush's success at souring the North Atlantic Alliance is as ephemeral as all his other "successes".

Aside from this flawed article, there's an excellent article in the same issue about the very questionable link between authoritarian states and terrorism:

THE UNITED STATES is engaged in what President George W. Bush has called a "generational challenge" to instill democracy in the Arab world. The Bush administration and its defenders contend that this push for Arab democracy will not only spread American values but also improve U.S. security. As democracy grows in the Arab world, the thinking goes, the region will stop generating anti-American terrorism. Promoting democracy in the Middle East is therefore not merely consistent with U.S. security goals; it is necessary to achieve them.....

Given such incomplete information, only preliminary conclusions from the academic literature are possible. However, even these seem to discredit the supposedly close link between terrorism and authoritarianism that underlies the Bush administration's logic. In a widely cited study of terrorist events in the 1980s the political scientists William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg demonstrate that most terrorist incidents occur in democracies and that generally both the victims and the perpetrators are citizens of democracies. Examining incidents from 1975 to 1997, Pennsylvania State University's Quan Li has found that although terrorist attacks are less frequent when democratic political participation is high, the kind of checks that liberal democracy typically places on executive power seems to encourage terrorist actions. In his recent book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape finds that the targets of suicide bombers are almost always democracies, but that the motivation of the groups behind those bombings is to fight against military occupation and for self-determination. Terrorists are not driven by a desire for democracy but by their opposition to what they see as foreign domination....

Comparing India, the world's most populous democracy, and China, the world's most populous authoritarian state, highlights the difficulty of assuming that democracy can solve the terrorism problem. For 2000-2003, the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report indicates 203 international terrorist attacks in India and none in China. A list of terrorist incidents between 1976 and 2004, compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, shows more than 400 in India and only 18 in China. Even if China underreports such incidents by a factor of ten, it still endures substantially fewer terrorist attacks than India. If the relationship between authoritarianism and terrorism were as strong as the Bush administration implies, the discrepancy between the number of terrorist incidents in China and the number in India would run the other way....

The United States' major foe in the war on terrorism, al Qaeda, certainly would not close up shop if every Muslim country in the world were to become a democracy. Osama bin Laden has been very clear about democracy: he does not like it. His political model is the early Muslim caliphate. In his view, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan came the closest in modern times to that model. In an October 2003 "message to Iraqis," bin Laden castigated those in the Arab world who are "calling for a peaceful democratic solution in dealing with apostate governments or with Jewish and crusader invaders instead of fighting in the name of God." He referred to democracy as "this deviant and misleading practice" and "the faith of the ignorant." Bin Laden's ally in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, reacted to the January 2005 Iraqi election even more directly: "The legislator who must be obeyed in a democracy is man, and not God....That is the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error, as it contradicts the bases of the faith and monotheism, and because it makes the weak, ignorant man God's partner in His most central divine prerogative--namely, ruling and legislating."

-F. Gregory Gause III, "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?", Foreign Affairs, (Sep/Oct2005)

Excellent article. If you have access, I'd reccomend picking up the magazine.