Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt from Parag Khanna's new book under the headline "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony." It spins a future scenario in which US economic, cultural and diplomatic power cannot recover from the damage done over the past eight years, and the US is challenged by ascendent and assertive regional blocs headed by the EU and China. Khanna's vision is detailed and compelling. Doubtless in its book-length form, it is anchored with actual data points to substantiate the rather general conclusions bandied about in the excerpt. As a possible future, it seems, well, possible.
Like almost all futurist writing, however, Khanna's piece suffers from a surfiet of certitude. No doubt there are definite trends in economic, geopolitics and culture that support Khanna's scenario. It is also true that several trends point to long-term structural and social problems in both China and the EU - notably the demographics of aging, dwindling populations across most of Europe and the disproportionate lack of young women in China relative to men as a result of the one-child policy of the 1970s.
Writer Philip Longman, in his book The Empty Cradle, observed that if current declines in fertility rates in Europe continue at their current rate, by 2050, most adult Europeans will have no living relatives. Does that sound like the blueprint for an ascendent society?
In China, the social preference for boy children and government policies toward abortion combined with efforts at population control have led to male to female ratios as high as 1.25:1 in some provinces. In terms of China's giant population, that means that something like 50 million Chinese men currently in their 20s and 30s will not find a female partner. Historically, large cohorts of sexually-frustrated young men is not a recipe for social cohesion. It usually leads to elevated levels of crime and political pressure for wars and foreign adventures. At the moment, it is fueling a steady traffic in sex slaves from Southeast Asia that is resulting in a musrooming incidence of AIDS and other STDs that the Chinese government seems incapable of acknowledging, much less responding to.
The bottom line is that everywhere has its problems. Looking at the future through the lens of the irrefutable decline in American soft power definitely raises issues for planners and policy-makers to consider, but it is just one of several possible outcomes given the multiple dimensions of uncertainty and crosscutting dynamics driving events over the next 10-15 year horizon.