POX AMERICANA

WAR OF THE WORLD

The “American Century” is a myth, says historian Niall Ferguson. Though the years 1900 to 1999 witnessed the emergence of the United States as the world’s sole superpower, the bigger story was that the power of the West as a whole fell in relation to the East. The unprecedented violence of those hundred years, especially the first 50 or so, accelerated the West’s material and “moral” decline. The eruption of mass killing wasn’t arbitrary. The bloodshed was concentrated, Ferguson says, in regions that were each beset by three troubling dynamics—economic instability, ethnic tension, and the collapse of an empire. And while the West is unlikely to regain the dominance it once enjoyed, the world as a whole can avoid a reprise of the 20th century’s horrors if today’s empires attend to those three factors more wisely.

http://www.niallferguson.org/