#The new world order free

share of the global economy hasn’t declined since 1969.

Amid an otherwise cogent explanation of why American hegemony has been a good thing, he asserts that there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue, given that the U.S. In The World America Made, which got a lot of attention early this year because President Obama praised an excerpt from it published in The New Republic, Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan simply denies the shift. There are different ways one can react to this. and Europe has shifted the balance, dispersing economic power around the globe. But the very success of this arrangement is now undoing it. was the dominant player, with Western Europe an important number two. One key to this success has been that these institutions-unlike the relatively feckless United Nations-have reflected the real balance of global economic power. This setup, however imperfect, has allowed nation after nation to rise to affluence over the past 60 years. The key institutions here were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), and the grouping of political leaders known first as the G-7, then the G-8. It happened because the United States and its allies designed a system that encouraged it.

#The new world order free

The triumph of free enterprise around the world since the end of World War II was not a fluke. The same goes for global economic governance. Which may still happen, but it will involve hard political choices. The architects of the euro hoped that the reality of the currency zone would force the political and economic changes needed to make it work. Europe unified its money without unifying its economy, and that’s not sustainable. And the euro’s current troubles are the fault of a design flaw, not of the governments or markets per se. Yes, creating the European currency required government action, but many of its most eager advocates were free marketeers. Capitalism doesn’t bring widespread prosperity under all possible circumstances it needs effective governance and institutions to deliver the goods.Ĭonsider the euro.

To a certain extent, this marks the victory of free enterprise-private property and profit are key elements of any conceivable solution to today’s problems. The most important choices today aren’t between government and free enterprise they’re between political and economic systems that work and those that don’t.

For most other purposes, though, it feels pretty retro. This Manichaean view still resonates in political circles, particularly in the U.S., and even more particularly among Republicans on the campaign trail. They were battles for the commanding heights. It used to be that most of the world’s big political and economic questions could plausibly be framed as struggles pitting government against free enterprise.