HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018214.jpg

America becomes number two, we will still have a better world. In many
ways, the world is “converging” to American values and standards, as I
explain in The Great Convergence. The global middle class is booming,
interstate war is waning, and never before have people traveled and
communicated across the world so easily. These changes are creating
common values and norms across the world. Education and scientific
reasoning, for example, are enabling people the world over to speak with a
common language. However, while humanity is well on its way to
combating absolute poverty and interstate warfare, other problems are
surfacing. Preventing and curtailing transnational issues like climate
change, human and drug trafficking, and financial crises require
cooperation among nation states, yet this is not happening. A simple
analogy illustrates this. Before the era of modern globalization,
humankind was like a flotilla of more than 100 separate boats in their
separate countries. The world needed a set of rules then to ensure that the
many boats did not collide and facilitate their cooperation on the high seas
if they chose to do so. The 1945 rules-based order strived to do this, and
despite some obvious failures, it succeeded in producing a relatively stable
global order for more than 50 years. Today, the 7 billion people who
inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than 100 separate boats.
Instead, they live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat
has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive
responsibility for one cabin. No captain or crew cares for the boat as a
whole. The world is now sailing into increasingly turbulent waters with no
captain or crew at the helm. The Great Convergence echoes the themes
of Clinton’s 2003 Yale speech. It’s in the interest of all – particularly great
powers – to strengthen institutions of global governance so that we’re not
sailing blindly into choppy waters without a captain. The National
Intelligence Council recently projected that in 2030 Asia would overtake
the Western world economically, technologically and militarily. When
China becomes a world superpower in a matter of decades, the United
States and Europe will want to ensure that China plays by the rules.
But in order to make international organizations like the United Nations,
the IMF and the World Bank more credible and effective, they must

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018214