Who Wants to Be Number Two？

　　SINCE the end of the Cold War in the late 1980sand early 1990s, it is widely accepted that the UnitedStates has been the world’s sole superpower. This isbased on two indisputable facts. The first is the size ofits economy, which has been utterly dominant over thisperiod and constitutes approximately a quarter of globalGDP. The second is the size of its military. The UnitedStates has the army, navy and air force powers to projectits force over the rest of the world. It spends more ondefense than the next 10 countries put together. It hasdominance in technology and in capability. Uniquely,it has the capacity to be involved in security issuesthroughout Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. It is theone power with this kind of global reach.

　　U.S.decline

　　In the last decade since the tragedy of September 11 in2001, however, the United States’ dominance has beenquestioned. It has been stretched with two costly warsin Iraq and Afghanistan, which have lasted longer thanexpected and proved more complex in their outcomesboth politically and economically. President BarackObama made it clear upon his election in 2008 thathe wished to see a phased withdrawal of all U.S. troopsfrom Afghanistan, the last ongoing military action byU.S.-led forces. This is due to happen by 2015. In addition,the U.S. economy has been under immense stressbecause of the sub-prime crisis which started to appearin 2007, and decimated the country’s finance sector andits exports in the next two years.

　　The United States has returned tosteadygrowth in 2012 and the first two quartersof 2013, and looks likely to post strongergrowth than expected this year. However,Vice President Joe Biden admitted duringa meeting with Chinese Vice Premier WangYang at the China-U.S. Strategic and PoliticalDialogue in Washington D.C. in July that theeconomy is still suffering large structuralchallenges, with high levels of debt and thecontinuing need to create jobs and supportmanufacturing.

　　Commentators are keen to talk ofthisas an era of U.S. decline, and of there now being abipolar or tri-polar world. In 2009, in particular, duringthe G20 Summit held in London and before PresidentObama’s visit to China later that year in November,there was talk of a G2, with China as the world’ssecond most powerful nation. Much of this was basedon the fact that aggregately China has become theworld’s second largest economy, and one of the mainsources for global growth, in the last five years. It isnatural to impute China with an enhanced and prominentglobal rank.

　　However, Chinese leaders at the time were keento stress that G2 was not something they recognizedor aspired to. Many of them pointed out that Chinaremained a country with per-capita levels of wealththat put it around number hundred in global rankings.So why would it wish to push itself toward a role nowtaken by the United States? Its prioritiesremained attending to its own internalissues of growth, sustainability andbalance.

　　Being number two is never easy inany system. There are always suspicionsabout how second rankingpowers or people harbor ambitions toreplace the number one in the future.There is a natural feeling that no onecan stay in the top position forever,and that there is an inbuilt proclivityto decline in the top players after theirmoment of glory. Many worry that thisdecline might be marked by unrest,tension and conflict, as happenedwhen the UK was replaced by Germany and then theUnited States in the early part of the 20th century,an event which unleashed conflicts in Europe andresulted in two massive world wars. The world cannotbear the costs of this sort of transition. That, at least,seems clear.

　　Multi-polar world

　　For this reason, the talk earlier in the 2000s of a “multipolar”world might be worth revisiting. The Cold Warera’s two clear, stark poles of influence, with the SovietUnion on one side and the United States on the other,seems more like an aberration now, rather than somestandard template. Before and after this starkly bipolarmoment, there was much more confusion, with somepowers dominant in trade areas, some in military areas,and some through their political and diplomatic influence.

　　In an era of accelerated and deeper globalization,where we talk of “flat-earth technologies” and free tradeagreements eroding national barriers, is there muchsense in talking of dominant countries that can thendictate the direction of the world in the future? Thereseems to be much more competition now betweenstates in these areas.

　　This focus on global rather than national prioritiesis increasingly important in view of the nature of likelyfuture threats. Most agree that the world is unlikelyto implode into the sorts of mass violence we saw inthe previous century. U.S. scientist Stephen Pinker inhis book The Better Angels of Our Nature talks of thewidespread decline of violence as a means to resolvedifferences in the modern world. The horror of WorldWar II was enough to force countries to agree thatthis, along with the guaranteed annihilation of nuclearwar, militated against any large-scale mobilization inthe future. The threats now are from localized terrorism,and then from famine and, most disturbing ofall, the effects of climate change. These respect nogeographies, and are only soluble with global action.Even superpowers cannot cut themselves off fromthe impact of these problems.

　　It is unlikely in the near future that there will bea coherent unified world government respondingto these shared global risks, just as it is unlikely thatnation states will slowly disappear. But there will beprofoundly different ways that we think about nationsand about their role in the world. The starkly differentvisions of economic strategy and governance that theSoviet Union and the United States had to differentiatethem no longer exist. Most governments agreethat they have to deliver sustainable growth and thatthey need policies that support their people’s aspirationsto have the best modern life they can.

　　This sharing of a collective understanding of whatdevelopment is about means that in the next decade,it is likely that China will become the world’s largesteconomy, but that the United States will continueto be the dominant military and political player. Itsoverall per-capita levels of wealth and its global seriesof alliances will remain strong. For this reason, themanagement of the relationship between the UnitedStates and China in ways which are harmonious andmutually productive will be the key relationship in theforeseeable future.

　　But around these key relations, there will beaseries of players who will all be immensely importantfor different reasons - Russia because of its immenseresources, the EU for the size of its market, Braziland India because of their importance as emergingeconomies. In many ways, we have to wean ourselvesoff global rankings, and that we have to have a globalrank. Economic power will be important, but not thesole reason for a country being influential. There willbe ways in which countries like Australia have majorroles to play because of their strategic location andtheir influence on global environmental issues.

　　The EU economic crisis over the last few years hasreminded the world that while big countries get allthe attention, the smaller ones should never be neglected.

　　The woes in the euro zone were created notin Germany, France or the UK but in Greece. Fightingwith the issues of debt in this, one of the smallestmember states of the EU, has absorbed the attentionof the whole group of 28. A system which manages tohear the voices and pay attention to the interests ofsmaller states is hugely important. In that sense, themulti-polar world we are moving toward will also bea more secure one. The world watching one or twopowers exclusively is an inattentive and distractedone, and that cannot be a good thing.