America and the balance of power

(Image: Rebecca, Picassa)

The shifting balance of power in the world and where the U.S. stands in the midst of economic and foreign policy challenges.

It seems that today you can’t turn on the TV (or the radio) without hearing talk of American decline. The country is in the throes of a financial crisis, and grinding through two wars. China, India, Russia and others are sitting at the big kids’ table, and even a recent National Intelligence Council report warns that America’s unipolar moment is over. Others say, not so fast—the US has been declared dead before, but it turns out it was just resting. "

"America Abroad" takes measure of American power and leadership amid the rise of the rest. Host Ray Suarez conducts this roundtable discussion with: Francis Fukuyama, Professor of International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins University; Robert Kagan, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "The Return of History and the End of Dreams"; Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and author of "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Power to the East."

Ray Suarez: America still remains, for all the gloom and doom, the world's dominant economy, I guess we have to keep that in mind. But indebtedness, Robert Kagan, does that decrease your leverage, decrease your independence of movement, in a way that America still has to take the measure of?

Robert Kagan: Well I don't know, I mean obviously it limits your options to some extent, although it's not preventing us from probably spending a trillion dollars more on a stimulus package. You know, indebtedness always cuts in both directions; the person who is your creditor is also bound to you and when people talk about our indebtedness to China, China holding so many treasury bonds and other kinds of American assets, people worry that somehow they'll sell it off one day and we'll go bankrupt, but of course China's economy is so symbiotically connected to the American economy that it’s hard to imagine that really happening, so debt always cuts both ways. And by the way, that cuts against this notion of Asian civilization and Western civilization; in the modern world we're so closely tied together that I don’t see how one rises necessarily at the expense of the other. I mean, right now because of the recession we're in, I would say that our problems are dragging China down and China’s recovery will be a function of America’s recovery, so I don't see it as that kind of zero-sum game where one is going up and one is going down.

Ray Suarez: Will China's political recovery, or political change, or political evolution, be moving on a track with its economic problems, or its economic successes?

Robert Kagan: Well that's a very good question right now. You know, we are seeing some strikes in China, and I suppose the good news is that taxi drivers can conduct strikes, the bad news and the sort of more hidden story is what the Chinese government is doing to the people who they think are responsible for that strike, and so you have this very interesting paradox in China of apparently greater economic freedom but there is a question as to whether if they don't allow more political freedom, we can get to where China's supposed to be in 2050, whether we can continue to have the economic growth that people are expecting.

Ray Suarez: Professor Mahbubani, you wanted to say?

Kishore Mahbubani: Yes, I'm going to say a couple of surprising things. Number one, I agree completely, by the way, I believe that America will bounce back and America will remain a very strong and powerful country, and I don’t believe in any kind of decline of America as a society; it's got so many strengths, so many resources, it will remain strong and powerful. And as you know, my three children study in America. Secondly I also agree with Bob Kagan about the interdependence of the world, and incidentally, the interdependence of the world is frankly a good thing, because if there's one thing that will ensure that the 21st century will not see a repeat of the 19th century European history of a zero-sum game among powers, is precisely because of growing interdependence, and China and America, as Tom Friedman once said, are joined at the hip and they will have to work together. Now on China's political system, the Chinese political story is an incredibly complex one because in theory if you look at it, China was run by the Communist Party in 1949 and will still be run by the Communist Party in 2009, but there's a completely different kind of Communist Party. Just today, I was hearing on a program, a young Chinese lady describing the remarkable transformation of a life in the last 20 years, and how she can travel freely, go around the world, turn on the Internet, connect with everybody, so the Chinese society has opened enormously, and the main challenge of the Chinese Communist Party is that it has to transform itself, it knows that it has to transform itself, the leaders talk about it when they meet, but the big challenge they face is, they're not sure how to do it, so I agree that there will be a challenge, but I am reasonably confident that given the quality of mind of Chinese leaders, they will overcome this challenge, too.

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This segment is the fifth in a five-segment program from "America Abroad." Listen to other segments and/or entire program.

Hosted by veteran public radio journalists Ray Suarez and Deborah Amos, "America Abroad" documentaries explore the critical international issues of our time.

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