Just as wars -- two World Wars and, equally important, the cold war -- dominated the geopolitical map of the 20th century, economics will rule over the 21st. All the big questions confronting the world in the century ahead are basically economic. Is the U.S. in an irreversible decline as the world's premier power? Will Japan continue its competitive conquest of international markets? Can Europe manage to hold together the world's largest trade bloc in the face of strong centrifugal forces? And does the future hold any hope at all for the poverty-stricken Third World?
This concentration on economics will be made possible by the prospect of general peace in the 21st century, heralded by the lifting of the nuclear arms threat in the 1990s. In the century ahead, the world will contain more democracies than ever before, and they will dominate in Europe, the Americas and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Since it is a truism that democratic states do not make war on one another, warfare should become essentially irrelevant for these nations, most of which will reduce their armed forces to the minimum necessary for individual or collective defense. "We're not going to see nation-states bullying one another as they have in the past," predicts senior analyst Carl Builder of the Rand Corp.
New realities will also curb the old acquisitive impetus toward imperialism. Raw materials of all sorts, for example, will lose much of their importance because the manufacture of 21st century products will use fewer and fewer of & them. Even the need for oil, now the most vital of interests in the West, will fall from the strategic agenda as it is replaced by solar power and controlled nuclear fusion. The end of the petroleum age will make the Arab states of the Middle East poorer and less stable but of declining interest to the West. The Islamic world, powerfully resistant to modernization, will tend to isolate itself.
Unfortunately, the lifting of the nuclear threat in the 1990s will continue to create opportunities for mischief among some nationalist ideologues and local despots. In the decades ahead, the major powers will ignore most petty tyrants and the brutal but small-bore wars that they foment -- unless they seriously endanger their neighbors or threaten their own people with genocide. When that occurs, the United Nations will, in most cases, authorize joint armed intervention. When it does not, the U.S. and other states that share its views will act on their own.
But cooperation with the U.N. will be the norm, in both warlike and peaceful pursuits. The world will have to utilize the powers of the U.N. to solve other overreaching problems, such as environmental pollution, global warming and damage to the ozone layer, that cannot be approached piecemeal. John Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, foresees "a much more advanced form of international politics, involving more sophisticated coordination and more consequential decisions made at the international level."