Charles Kenny is senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West from which this article is adapted.

There certainly has been a lot of fodder for pessimists in thinking about the state of America on the brink of a new year: rising inequality and continued high unemployment, government dysfunction in Washington, Western impotence in the face of the ongoing and tragic civil war in Syria and turmoil in Egypt, the United States no longer the world’s largest trading nation, the Edward Snowden debacle. It is easy to paint a picture of a country losing its way at home while losing its influence abroad as rising Asian powers challenge its hegemony.

But optimists take note: that picture is highly distorted if not outright misleading. In fact, the future has never been brighter.


Yes, it’s true that the West no longer enjoys the relative global economic dominance it had even just 10 years ago. But that is far more about the rest of the world doing better than it is about the stuttering recent performance of Western economies. Improved health, more education, greater security and increased liberty are great achievements for billions around the globe—and for us too. Indeed, there are huge opportunities for the West to take advantage of a rising Rest. The United States and Europe have already benefited from stronger trade and investment links with the developing world over the past 10 years. Over the next two decades, the potential for greater prosperity at home thanks to a stronger and safer world abroad will be even larger. Yet you wouldn’t know it from all the handwringing of those warning us incessantly of the West’s inevitable decline and fall.

Four unquestioned assumptions lie behind the declinists’ predictions of misery to come: first, the West is to blame for its own decline; second, biggest is best; third, the rise of the Rest is bad for the West; and finally, Fortress America (or Fortress Europe) is our only surety. Thus, Charles Krauthammer declares in the Weekly Standard that “decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.” He warns that “the international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power,” and so, “if we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. They will fill the vacuum. Inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.” But it isn’t just thinkers from the right who buy into at least some of the declinist agenda. Take Joseph Nye, declaiming from the liberal ramparts of Harvard that “while the ‘rise of the rest’ means that America will be less dominant than it once was, this does not mean that China will necessarily replace the U.S. as the world’s leading power”—at least as long as the United States steps up by raising taxes, cutting expenditures and improving secondary education.

The declinists’ prescriptions for Washington or Brussels that follow from these four assumptions are positively harmful for us—and everyone else. Yet despite their support from both left and right, all four assumptions are wrong.

The first declinist assumption is that our decline is the result of something we’re doing wrong: too little investment in education (or roads, or corporate subsidies), or taxation that is too high (or not high enough), or youth who are too addled by television (or fattened by fast food) or old folks who are too coddled by expensive doctors (or financed by federal debt)—name your poison.

But there’s good news—this time it really isn’t our fault. The U.S. economy has had some tough years of late, but as a rule it chugs along at a growth rate a little above 2 percent—and has done so ever since hardly anyone went to college, no federal highway system had been built, there were only three channels on TV and obesity and old folks were both very rare indeed. The heady days of the tech boom at the end of the 1990s saw growth rates maybe half a percent faster than this average. The story is similar for Europe.

What’s happening now is that the Rest are growing faster. China, the world’s most populous country, grew at an average rate of over 9 percent between 2010 and 2012. India grew at nearly 7 percent over the same period. Seven percent is more than three times our long-term growth rate. The developing world has an easier time growing fast, because we have invented a lot of technologies they can use to catch up to our levels of wealth. If they avoid tragic incompetence in policymaking, that means we should expect them to converge toward Western levels of income per person. In turn that implies the world is slowly returning to an era when economic dominance is largely a function of population—the default state for humanity for most of history, barring the industrial revolution. So we can stop blaming Washington, or Eurocrats, or kids today or wastrel boomers for the decline of the West. However annoying they surely are, they are not to blame for China getting bigger than we are. There’s one simple reason for that: China has a lot more people than the United States or Europe.

The second verse of the declinist creed praises the benefits of being big. And of course, the United States in particular is a country that thrives on big. From the most powerful military to the largest medal haul at the Olympics, global dominance is part of the American national psyche. So the idea of not being the biggest economy really hurts. Surely the end of economic heavyweight status means even more rapid decline, ever-greater threats to our national security and a world turned against us.

But biggest isn’t always best—think about the West’s own growing problem with obesity. In fact, the benefits of being big are much oversold. Being big didn’t stop the United States from sliding into recession in 2008, or from sliding down the global league tables—in areas from health to wealth, leisure to liberties, or corruption to incarceration—over the past 40 years. And the advantages of brute size in areas from trade to finance to military power are not what they used to be. The World Trade Organization constrains trade policy, global financial connections reduce the power of the dollar’s reserve currency status and imperial adventures are bound by a limited domestic appetite to bear the costs of fighting, combined with a growing global antipathy to wars of conquest. Take the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which had to be justified as defensive wars to preserve global stability and the public good. There was never any question that the planet’s undoubted military hegemon would eventually leave both countries to their own devices. But that’s not necessarily bad; in fact, because similar constraints apply to China, the security threat presented to the world by its rising economic hegemony will almost certainly be reduced.

Third up in the declinist litany: Pessimists in the West tend to see the rise of the Rest, just like the earlier rise of Japan, as a terrible thing. If the rest of the world gets richer, that means somehow that we in the West must be poorer. One more manufacturing job for China is one less for Louisiana. One more call center employee in Bangalore is one less receptionist in Poughkeepsie. Others fear the rise of the Rest because rich people elsewhere will consume resources as we do—or at least they’ll do that until none are left. Having seen the world so recently come off a bubble and plunge into a recession, many find it easy to picture the entire planet embarking on a resources binge that ends with environmental and economic collapse.

But the future is considerably brighter than that. All the concern over economic competition is, at the very least, overly simplistic, if not completely wrong. Think about it: If more global wealth really meant a West that is worse off, the United States and Europe would poorer than they ever have been today—because the rest of the world has never been richer. But that’s not the case at all; in fact, growing economies overseas are a destination for our exports, a place to invest and a source of investment and an ever-expanding font of new ideas, technologies and products that improve the quality of life everywhere. Sure, new industries abroad compete with entrenched interests at home, but they create opportunities for entrepreneurs as well—think of Apple, KFC and Starbucks selling to all of those newly wealthy Chinese consumers. As long as we help people and companies manage change, global prosperity is great news for the West. And a more peaceful, more cosmopolitan world will be a nicer one to visit, barter with and live in as well.

But will a richer, massively consuming planet lead to war over resources and environmental collapse? When it comes to mineral resources in particular, the challenge to the global economy comes not from growing scarcity, but from abundance too great for sustainable use. Luckily, poor countries are already following a much more sustainable path to wealth than rich countries did in the past. So while there is an undoubted need for an urgent response to the global use of non-renewables like oil, the possibility that we will manage to move onto a sustainable growth trajectory is real.

The final element of the declinist creed takes it as gospel that the best response to a changing world is disengagement: higher tariffs, barriers to Asian investment, tighter immigration controls. It is not surprising that a country bruised by two equivocal wars and battered by recession would show signs of surrendering to isolationist tendencies. If the world has no gratitude for American leadership, if the only thing that trade has done for the United States is pile up IOUs to China, if open borders lead only to Mexicans taking our jobs and terrorists and new diseases threatening our lives, it is pretty clear that the rational response is to close the gates and hope the world just goes away.

Except for the fact that the West needs the rest of the world more than ever. In an earlier era—sometime before the 1970s—American isolationism might have prolonged the country’s status as the largest economy. Today, closing off trade, investment and the flow of people between us and the rest of the world would do harm to them—but more to ourselves.

It is all very well to shut the borders, but who’s going to pick the fruit and paint the fences? As the West ages, there will be fewer and fewer young, locally born people around to do the heavy lifting. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 there were 59 people younger than 18 or over 65 for every 100 people of working age. By 2030, as the baby boomers retire, that ratio is expected to climb to 75 dependents for every 100 working-age Americans. So we need to import more labor. Meanwhile, the United States could benefit mightily from exporting people, too—the young to get educated at wholesale prices abroad, adults to find jobs and investment opportunities and the old to retire in greater comfort with cheaper health care.

A rising Rest will also help us deal not only with America’s economic challenges but with a raft of shared global issues, from financial stability to climate, health and security. Already, emerging markets provided much of the financial backing required to help shore up ailing European economies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. China is the largest producer of solar panels worldwide—and was forecast to become its largest solar power producer by the close of 2013. India is a global leader in the production of low-cost drugs, including those used to combat HIV and other infectious diseases. The vast majority of U.N. peacekeeping forces come from developing countries. Being number one has its advantages, to be sure, but increasingly, we need other countries to step up—and it shouldn’t frighten us when they do.

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Not only do they make bad assumptions, the declinists also have a hard time making up their minds. One moment, the Rest is about to overtake us through unfair competition. The next moment it is a starving morass, helpless without our aid or invasion. We are either sorry for the developing countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia or scared of them. But more and more of the developing world is neither worthy of fear nor desirous of pity—it is a place of immense opportunity. Think of how countries like Britain and the United States view France—as sometimes annoying, but basically a useful partner, a great place to visit and a source of nice things from cheese to wine to haute couture. This is how we should see the rest of the world.

Official Washington sometimes acknowledges this fact. The Obama administration’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, for example, supports “countries’ efforts to achieve sustained and broad-based economic growth, which creates opportunities for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, away from violent extremism and instability, and toward a more prosperous future.”

America’s National Security Strategy suggests that, “through an aggressive and affirmative development agenda and commensurate resources, we can strengthen the regional partners we need to help us stop conflict and counter global criminal networks; build a stable, inclusive global economy with new sources of prosperity; advance democracy and human rights; and ultimately position ourselves to better address key global challenges by growing the ranks of prosperous, capable and democratic states that can be our partners in the decades ahead.”

But at the same time, when countries do actually get more prosperous, we accuse them of stealing our jobs, our markets or our security. Presidential candidates use foreign countries and migrants as convenient evils that can be denigrated without fear of lost votes or donations (so much more straightforward than attacking guns or tobacco). Many in Congress fulminate against the growing influence of international treaty organizations as if they were the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, Opus Dei and the Communist International all rolled into one.

At times the sophisticated foreign policy thinkers of Georgetown or the Ivy League are no better. International relations theory is too often presented in purely relative terms. The realist position effectively proposes that every country is solely out to be top of the pile. That’s impossible for the vast majority, of course, and dumb even for the few for whom it is plausible. This isn’t a zero-sum competition, and foreign policy thinking that treats the world that way is immensely counterproductive.

All this theorizing and posturing has real-world consequences when it comes to America’s ability to engage globally and create the institutions it will need when it inevitably loses its top-nation status. People in the United States want jobs and security and education and health and a clean environment. All of those things are easier to provide in a world of global partnership than they are in a zero-sum world. And it is about time that message was trumpeted from the well of the House of Representatives to the halls of Columbia University.

This message is particularly important because there is nothing inevitable in either the continued rise of the Rest or the benefits that will accrue to the West. Perhaps China’s economy will crash under the weight of banking stupidity that eclipses even that of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers in 2008. Perhaps rogue elements will get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and foment a regional nuclear war. Perhaps climate change will happen faster, with more disastrous impacts, than consensus scenarios suggest. Or perhaps the growing spread of antibiotic resistance will create a superbug that kills millions. There are many potential threats to global progress and a high quality of life that we should prepare against in partnership and with urgency and resolve. But one thing that is simply not a threat is continued economic and social progress in the developing world. That is an immense opportunity—and one that the West should be doing all that it can to nurture and sustain.

Numerous self-help books suggest that we’d be happier and more balanced people if we spent less time worrying about status and more time enjoying what we have. That’s true for nation-states too. In fact, being number two or number three on a measure like absolute GDP not only doesn’t matter for our quality of life, it might actually help us climb to number one on a bunch more measures that do. So thank your lucky stars if you were born in the West in time to witness the rise of the Rest. Because it’s pretty much all upside.