Ross
calls Fareed Zakaria's itemized list proving America's decline "lapse into Friedmanesque blather." And, let's be clear, some of it is a bit silly:
The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.
But there's more here than "the casino and ferris wheel gap." Zakaria's point, as I took it, was not that we should race to build ever taller buildings or ever larger carnival rides, but something more fundamental: The fact that the ostentatious, useless symbols of affluence and excess in other countries are beginning to mirror, and even exceed, ours, suggests that we're facing potent competition on grounds where we're unused to challenge. We are no longer the only country with an internet, or a Sears Tower, if we ever truly were. And as more Americans come to realize that, it could have fairly profound psychological effects. After all, these symbols are how many folks have always understood our affluence, The reason the World Trade Center was a crucial American symbol wasn't because most folks understood it housed much of our financial sector. It was because they were two really tall, really impressive, buildings. They were a visual heuristic for power. But now other countries are developing their own entries into that genre, and they're no longer pale imitations of ours. As the world develops, America is going to start to look less exceptional -- as that's the inevitable result of
being less exceptional. The point of Zakaria's book, as I understand it, is that whether we see that shift as an opportunity or a threat is probably the most important foreign policy question of the 21st century.
Image used under a Creative Commons license from Shuttering2Think. 
