The good news is that these developments have set the stage for a new golden age of rising prosperity--but only if we shift our economic thinking from the neoliberal, export-oriented nostrums of the 1980s and '90s to the Keynesian ideas of the 1940s and '50s. Indeed, the solution to our economic problems as well as our foreign policy dilemma is to translate those productivity gains into rising wages and living standards in the newly industrialized and developing worlds--so that working men and women there can consume more of what they produce and so that the world economy can grow in a more balanced way.

For this reason, we must make full employment and ample demand the guiding principle of international economic policy, much as Roosevelt's policies did in the 1940s. We must become the champion of an international labor organization and a world labor movement that supports the establishment of unions in low-wage economies and fights Victorian-era working conditions in the world's factories. We must support public investment projects funded by international financial institutions to soak up excess labor and to give the unemployed in places like Egypt and Morocco a sense of economic opportunity. We need to put our weight behind the equivalent of New Deal programs like the TVA and the Civilian Conservation Corps and expand the efforts of specialized UN agencies like the World Health Organization to bring basic healthcare, education, housing and clean energy within the reach of billions of people and to relieve poverty in Africa and South Asia. We should also reorient the missions of the IMF and World Bank to support full employment and channel excess savings to public and social investment projects in the developing world. In short, we need to create institutions at the global level to do what the New Deal did for our national economy in the last century.

Our goal should be a New International Deal to build a global middle class and to eliminate global poverty. Rather than encourage emerging economies to develop through the export of manufactured goods and their component parts, we should champion what might be called middle-class-oriented development aimed at increasing domestic consumption--helping emerging economies to grow by expanding home ownership, investing in public infrastructure and creating more small and medium-size businesses, much as we did in the last century. This kind of middle-class development would have the beneficial effect of facilitating democratic reform in emerging economies while relieving the United States of the burden of serving as the locomotive of the world economy.

Competing Visions

Dedicating our foreign policy to a rapid rise of a global middle class and to a new international "community of power" would do far more for our security and future prosperity than a prolonged, openly declared war against Islamic jihadism. It would also help make us relevant again to the lives of millions of people--from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East to the Pacific--in a way that an agenda of fighting Islamic jihadism does not. That, together with a renewed respect for the international rule of law and a commitment to act as a good neighbor in fighting poverty and protecting the environment, would go a long way toward restoring America's standing in the world--not as a unipolar power but as a constructive leader of a diverse but increasingly interconnected world.

In the end, it comes down to a question of vision as well as of national interest. Many neoliberal Democrats would like the United States to be the second coming of imperial Britain, doing what Britain could not do in the 1920s and '30s. But as we are learning in Iraq, and as we did in Vietnam, the American people have no appetite for long, contested occupations of foreign lands. Nor do they have an appetite for a long, unending religious conflict in the Middle East. What they long for are not misguided heroic crusades but the respect of other nations and better lives for themselves and the many other people who share this planet.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.