HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!

America hasn't had a bad year since Ronald Reagan and the recession of the early 80s drained out the pus of the 60s/70s, which makes it easy for we Americans to be optimistic every year, but things seem to be going particularly well these days. Not only does the American economy remain strong, with interest rate cuts in the offing, but the world economy is the strongest it has ever been in human history, with even places like sub-Saharan Africa experiencing economic growth.

On the geopolitical scene, America has at long last turned away from the dying nations of secular Europe and forged a nascent Axis of Good that incorporates states like India, Israel, Indonesia, Mongolia, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, Poland, etc. into an implicit Anglosphere that is almost uniformly led by conservative governments. This extraordinarily powerful alliance means that, even as the Middle East rapidly liberalizes and Reforms, the forces of liberalism are well-positioned to contain the few really malfunctioning "Gap" states. Meanwhile, the economic strategies being pursued by even non-aligned and undemocratic states -- like China and Vietnam -- increase the pressures of globalization (which is really just the Anglo-American model) on everyone. Not only does Chinese investment abroad give them a vested interest in stability and economic coherence nearly everywhere, but it serves to further isolate those few states -- like North Korea -- that are agents of instability and incoherence. In this fashion, even our ostensible enemies serve as de facto allies. It would hardly be surprising, therefore, to see China effect a regime change in North Korea and save us the trouble.

On the home front, there is such a powerful Third Way consensus throughout the Anglosphere that the question isn't whether we will reform our entitlement system but at what pace we will. Democrats will likely need to make up new names for the measures that the GOP has long been proposing and will probably only vote for them in their least efficient forms -- in order to maintain the fiction that they haven't abandoned the New Deal/Great Society. But the fact is that, for instance, IRAs/401ks have transformed retirement already, even if it would have made more sense to replace Social Security with them. Making them universal and kicking government funding into them for the young and the poor will further the ends of Reform, even if we end up with jerry-rigged means. The larger point is that there is no possibility of the system becoming more Second Way. The era of big government is over. There is a strong government consensus.

All of these long term trends are so powerful and so favorable as to make the obsessive scab-picking over short-term problems by partisans and the press just silly. The world isn't merely going our way but is doing so at a pace that's truly unprecedented. After twenty-five consecutive good years, we've every reason to expect another. Enjoy yours.

MORE:
Still the shining city on a hill: Despite all the anger, the world still turns to America for hope. (Pico Iyer, January 1, 2007, LA Times)

And yet, I feel like saying, America — though still the strongest power in the world — is by no means the largest or even the central one. One in every three people on our planet lives in China or India, and for those worthy souls, the new century is a time of possibilities unimagined before. There is corruption and oppression and pollution all over China; India is still a byword for suffering and poverty; and yet, for well over 2 billion of our neighbors in the global village, history is moving in a positive direction right now.

In Japan, where I live, people are beginning to look up at last after a decade of recession. In Berlin, where I spent some of the summer, the wounds of the recent past seem so unthreatening that they have been turned into architectural wonders. In Bolivia, where I often find myself, people are exulting in the fact that for the first time in their history, they have a leader who looks and sounds quite a bit like themselves. Growing up near London, I could never have dreamed that the dreary, colorless, greasy home of fish and chips would, in just a generation, become one of the hottest — youngest, freshest, most stylish and international — cities on the planet.

I know, of course, that in Kashmir, in the Middle East, and especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is war; the sadder truth is that there has been war in all of these places for a long, long time. I know that more than a billion of our neighbors are without enough food or water or shelter, and that it is our responsibility in a planetary community to think of them and care for them. Traveling around Sri Lanka this summer, suicide bombers doing their work all around me, I found myself not only in an all-too-typical modern cycle of vengeance without end, I was also in a model, on the physically paradisal island, of so many places on the planet where two groups feel they cannot share the same space, and the intolerance of a few makes for the daily tragedy of the many.

Yet almost everywhere I have been these last 12 months, people are still looking to America for its unique and longtime industry: hopefulness. America on the screen and in their minds continues to mean, among all the difficult and belligerent things it now means, the capital of possibility. Immigrants write back to relatives around the world to say that their new home is not the land they dreamed of, but it is a place where a new life is possible and futures can be generated.

The U.S. government and its cultural exports may never have been so unpopular; the American spirit of possibility may never have been so prevalent.

At inauguration, Da Silva promises economic growth (The Associated Press, January 2, 2007)

In his inauguration speech, da Silva promised to increase the lackluster Brazilian economic growth rate, which has lagged behind rates in the rest of South America, without sacrificing the social programs that experts say have helped lift millions out of poverty and that are largely responsible for his popularity.

"We will remove obstacles so that Brazil can grow in an accelerated way," da Silva said. "Brazil can't continue to be prisoner held in a web of invisible steel, debating and agitating, without seeing the fabric that holds it back."

He said that he would soon unveil economic policies to spur annual economic growth of 5 percent — a goal most analysts consider ambitious. [...]

Despite the leftist backdrop to the inauguration, da Silva governs from the center-left. He has a cordial relationship with President George W. Bush and is viewed by Washington as a moderate influence on the continent. Da Silva told lawmakers that he would stick to orthodox monetary policy.

But getting congressional support for structural economic reforms that experts say are necessary could be difficult. "High on the agenda are controlling public spending and serious tax reform," said Michael Shifter, a Latin America analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "To pursue such reforms would put him in conflict with his own base and party loyalists."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2007 11:51 PM