Globally Rational

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If you were an employer looking at resumès (let’s say that the job candidates are actually cities), would you hire Beijing? Take a look at their resumè:

• They invaded Tibet years ago and still refuse to let them have their independence; meanwhile, they continue to oppress the locals.
• They refuse to accept the independent status of Taiwan.
• They execute even more people (per capita) than states like Iran, which we blame for excessive executions. China singlehandedly accounts for 90% of the world’s executions.
• The Great Firewall of China censors the entire country from visiting a huge multitude of websites, including Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, and even NBA.com.
• Religious freedom is a joke there; Roman Catholicism, for instance, is banned.
• They rank #162 (out of 169) in the worldwide Press Freedom Index, about the same as countries like Somalia (159), Iran (166), and Cuba (165). Would we give the Olympics to Somalia, Iran, or Cuba?

Consider Beijing’s competition for the job (the other finalists)… would you hire Beijing over any of these four?

• Toronto, which is one of the most well-designed/developed cities in the world.
• Paris, which pretty much speaks for itself.
• Istanbul, which has made huge strides in the last 20 years in terms of both economic and social development (unlike Beijing, which maintains its abysmal record).
• Osaka, which has a rich history and, thanks to recent Japanese advancement, a rich present/future.

Why did we still give the Olympics to China? Well, here’s a hint: George W. Bush is still planning on attending the opening ceremonies, despite pressure from Hillary Clinton and many others. But Bush does have a record of being very interested in sports (and the prospect of developing relationships with major trading partners) but not in free speech and human rights.

When Beijing was offered the spot, VP Li Lanqing said that “The winning of the 2008 Olympic bid is an example of the the international recognition of China’s social stability, economic progress and the healthy life of the Chinese people.” Yes, it’s an example of “international recognition” of China’s progress… but just because we recognize its truth doesn’t mean that it’s true.

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If you do a Google search for “rise and fall of the empire”, you’ll get lots of results about the British and Roman empires, and maybe about the Third Reich. You might also see something about the great post-medieval empires, such as those of Spain, France, Portugal, the Ottomans, and the Mughals. There’s a possibility that you’ll read about the great powers of ancient Egypt or Babylon. You may even see something about Japan during World War II.

I predict that in 80 years, somebody will write a book called “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.” As we stand at the pinnacle of international American influence, we are nearly oblivious to the fact that we are clearly following the same pattern that so many empires did in the past. Ever since we extended our influence to the California in the Mexican War, the empire has been steadily growing and, I believe, reached its peak soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just think about it:

1836: US-born settlers in Texas revolt for independence from Mexico; soon, they joined the US.
1848: We take California, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada from Mexico in a war that was supposedly fought to help Texas keep their independence.
1894: We depose the independent ruler of Hawaii and take control of the state.
1898: In a war that was claimed to be for the purpose of helping Cuba gain independence from Spain, we somehow end up getting Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines. This was followed by the little-known Philippine-American war, where we killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos because we didn’t want to give them independence.
1900: The US claims what is now known as American Samoa.
1903: US warships deployed to help Panama separate from Colombia (so that we could take control of the planned Panama Canal Zone).
1917: The US purchases the Virgin Islands from Denmark (of course, they didn’t ask the locals for their opinion).
Various times in the 1910’s - 1950’s: US occupies Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
1945: We occupy Japan, West Germany, and many other territories after World War II. We finally let go of the Philippines.
1948: We create Israel with no regard to what will happen to the people (Palestinians) who were already living there.
After 1945: The Pax Americana, a short period of peace (caused by the Cold War) analagous to Rome’s Pax Romana and Britain’s Pax Britannica. I’m not sure how this theory accounts for Korea and Vietnam.

After World War II, the line between “war” and “not war” has become vague. Since then, we have established spheres of influence (via war) in South Korea, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries. We have also failed to establish such areas in Vietnam and Afghanistan. For a large portion of the Cold War, the world was split into the “American Bloc”, the “Soviet Bloc”, and the “Third World”.

That was the rise. The fall started slowly when we lost control of Cuba, then the Philippines (although that turned out alright), the North Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan… and now we’re in a pointless campaign in Iraq. Our biggest trading partner (China) refuses to acknowledge the independence of Tibet and Taiwan. We have troops all over the world in places that don’t want our troops. We act like a corrupt international police force, choosing to participate in the most lucrative areas and ignoring the most dangerous areas (i.e. North Korea). We keep stretching… and any good chess player knows what happens when you overextend.

If you overextend in chess, you create weaknesses, as the British and the Romans did, that your opponent will eventually exploit. We have slowly let go of various parts of our empire (Cuba, the Philippines, the Panama Canal Zone, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau) as we attempt to reach out to other parts of the world. We are starting to realize that we overextended in Iraq, but we are still seriously contemplating an invasion of Iran. Meanwhile, there are still state-supported terrorist groups that hate us in North Korea. As we take control of the world, we are simultaneously isolating ourselves from the globalizing economy because we are trying to balance our imports and exports. We refuse to accept that the only way to decrease our reliance on imports is to eliminate the income gap that causes imported products to be so much cheaper than American products.

The British did the same thing. The Romans did it slower and the Third Reich did it faster. The Mongols were more aggressive and the Spanish were more innovative. But they all followed the same trend:

1. Imperialism starts; country reaches out to the world.
2. Country becomes a world power.
3. Country gets arrogant and starts to flex its muscles.
4. Country bites off more than it can chew… soon, it is forced to withdraw from its international outposts.

Spain and Britain survived the crash, but lost their power. The leaders of the Mughals and the Third Reich, on the other hand, ended up being executed or committing suicide as their empires fell. We are following the same trends… if we don’t avoid this overextension, we’ll suffer a similar fate.

How do we fix it? Like the answer to everything on this blog: awareness and education. It would be nice if the average American knew the difference between Lebanon and Syria.

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A few days ago, I had the opportunity to fly over four major cities: Kuwait, London, Boston, and New York (in that order). Looking at them from the airplane window, I noticed that the layout of the different cities says a great deal about the many comparisons and contrasts that can be made:

-The outskirts of Kuwait City are, of course, mostly desert. Flying over the city, however, you can see the effects of the rapid development in the past decade. Nearly every building is new and all of the engineering is novel. The roads are wide and well-developed. There is a high level of development near the ocean and it slowly faded as I looked towards the desert. It is obvious that the development is quickly working its way west and north, as the plans for Madinat al-Hareer confirm. Kuwait is 300 years old, but it has recently become a cosmopolitan hotspot.

-London’s vicinity is astonishingly green. Everywhere I looked, there was a golf course or a park or a cricket ground or a rugby field or a strange patch of greenery whose purpose even Google Earth failed to identify. I assume that in London, these patches of greenery are no unusual sight… but to a person whose background is in Pakistan (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because of negligence) and the US (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because it is inefficient), it was refreshing. I was not surprised to find that London has one of the lowest population densities of all megapolises. I learned today that the reason for the greenery (and the fact that London, according to the last link, is still less sparsely populated than New York) is that the UK has a Green Belt policy. London has grown very fast in its more recent history, but the city planners have kept up to pace, unlike their counterparts in Boston. The houses are very well-organized and the roads are far more modern than I’d expect out of such an old city.

-Boston is the reason why my expectations were low for London. When I spent the summer of 2005 in Boston, my biggest complaint was that the city was still functioning around the urban planning (or lack thereof) that happened when the Puritans founded the city 400 years ago. The old roads had been paved (but not widened) and new, equally narrow roads had been added. Houses were spaced out well, but this drove up property values unnecessarily without allowing the sort of greenery that characterized London. From the plane, Boston looked like a town built in SimCity by somebody who isn’t particularly good at the game. The skyline is modern, but the rest of the city seems like it was just thrown together haphazardly when settlers built houses wherever they wanted. Soon, everything was a historical landmark and nothing could be destroyed (plus, it’s cheaper to improve things than to rebuild them).

-New York suprised me. JFK and LaGuardia International Airports, both of which I went to, are located on Long Island. I expected the area to be packed with apartment buildings with no room to walk. I assumed that the roads would be just like Boston’s, since New York is just as old and its growth as a city was much more rapid. What I found, however, was houses with front yards, a developed grid of roads, and lots of baseball fields. It turns out that New York City’s vicinity is even more sparsely populated than London’s. I guess the idea of sprawling streets and tall apartment buildings is overplayed by the media and reinforced whenever somebody visits downtown Manhattan. It’s hard to make any direct conclusions from this; it’s just a series of observations that I think are interesting. I will continue to write about various cities as I fly to different parts of the world in the future. If I haven’t flown in a while, I might even use Google Earth to cheat.

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