My Comment: As a reader of this blog, you’ve come across ideas from Tom Barnett that I recycle from time to time. If you do nothing else today, I encourage you to read some of his thoughts that I re-post here. Fascinating stuff!

Regardless of our political leanings, all of us are a little scared about the future. Is the other side going to win and cause the status quo to come crashing down? This ‘glimpse’ might cause you to worry a little less. If you have time and want to read the rest, go HERE.

Here is some of the dialog from an interview with Tom Barnett:

Alex: That’s an incredible change for the world. Does that mean that the next few years are probably going to look a lot more like the last few years then they are the earlier days of American history where we were the one growing economy around the world?

Thomas: Well, we were the China of the late 19th century. And we scared people like China scares people now, and we were kind of a rough, rowdy, corrupt, jingoistic democracy, pretty warlike. And we still have that warlike image in a lot of people’s minds, because we’ve played leviathan to the global system for quite some time. We’ve been very successful in that. We haven’t seen any great power in war across the system for close to 70 years.

Part of that’s nukes, part of that’s America basically saying, “I’m not going to allow that.” Well, that role that we’ve played in the last six, seven decades has given us kind of a privileged sense that we run the world. The problem is, our strategy – our open-door strategy, if you will, of encouraging trade and investment to lead to connectivity, to hopefully, over time, lead to democracy – our success in doing that has created so many rising great powers out there that we’re no longer able to boss people around. That creates a certain crisis of confidence in our ability to manipulate the world around us.

It forces us to kind of look inward and recognize that there are some big parts of our society and economy that don’t work particularly well: health care, education that’s still structured in an industrial-era model – that really needs to be revamped if we are going to compete with not just the other players out there in the West but a global middle class that is ravenous in its demands. I mean, changing the resource-utilization models across the planet, but giving us a chance to sell to massively larger numbers of consumers than we’ve ever had in this world.

It’s a great time for us to reinvent ourselves. I look to a future that’s in my mind logically, say, 2030 and beyond, dominated by a China, India, and America. I call it my “CIA model of the future,” kind of three great superpowers. We are more likely to get to 2030 in great shape, compared to a China that has to democratize and create an environmental movement to really deal with the way it’s raping its own ecosystem and using up its water tables.

Same for an India that has to deal with all sorts of tumult and a caste system that still residually exists throughout. We’ve processed populist anger in America three or four times throughout our history. As much as we like to demean our own democracy, we’re actually pretty good at dealing with this kind of change. I give us much better odds than India or China, especially when you realize that compared to them we are chock full of cheap energy.

The fracking revolution reminds us and gives us that possibility again. And then we are, frankly, the OPEC of food, which is an unknown in most people’s minds here in America. We are the source – North America writ large – of 70% of the world’s moveable feast in terms of poultry, pork, the major grains, beef as well. We are an immense player in that realm; and when you layer on climate change, which is mostly going to be an equatorially centric phenomenon – massive droughts, much more difficulty with water shortages – we have a fairly long-term bright future. We’re going to be able to grow food. We’re going to have cheap energy. We’ve got an innovative economy.

We’ve just a couple small things to fix, relative to India and China: health care and education.

We get some serious political leaders willing to do that – which to me probably involves the boomers retiring from politics, because they’ve proven to be just about the worst political generation we’ve had in a century – and I think most of these things are quite fixable.

We’re looking at a major industrial renaissance in America. We’re looking at a rebound that will put us back up on top, to the point where I think you can legitimately argue a second American century, very likely. Not the same package we had in the second half of the twentieth century. We won’t get to rule by default, but I think there are attributes to this system that put us in a great leadership potential situation for the next five or six decades, easy.

Alex: That’s a fascinating insight on the way the world is working, and quite an interesting picture for America, which I think is different than many people paint today. I want to thank you for giving us your unique perspective on the world.

Referenced from: http://thomaspmbarnett.com/#ixzz29HjmLbjf