Since World War II, the United States has been the preeminent actor in world affairs. Its status at the end of that conflict, its role in creating postwar international institutions, its leadership in the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and its dominant status within the Western alliance during the Cold War are well known and beyond dispute. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, America emerged as the lone superpower. Yet some two decades later, its position of both absolute and relative power appears to have deteriorated. Many scholars and strategists point to economic, structural, political, and even military vulnerabilities, and contend that the United States is in serious decline. Meanwhile, the rise of important regional actors, especially Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICSs), as well as others such as Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and the increasingly prosperous and dynamic countries of East and Southeast Asia, is said to be seriously diminishing U.S. primacy in world affairs.

These depictions are pervasive on the Internet and in the press. A quick Google search for the term “American decline” yields 117 million “hits” in 0.13 seconds. A columnist for The New York Times writes that, “Wherever you choose to look . . . you’ll see a country in sad shape.” A leading German news magazine headlines, “A Superpower in Decline.” And from the realm of pop culture, the comic book action hero Superman renounces his U.S. citizenship. But are such assessments accurate?

Two propositions are widely asserted by those who see the ebbing of American predominance: first, that America itself as a society, an economy, and a political power is in decline; and second, that its international primacy is eroding as a result of the rise of other countries.

On the domestic front, the effects of a severe financial and economic crisis, an unprecedented national debt and deficit, a yawning balance of trade and payments deficits, and an aging and overloaded infrastructure lead a prominent financial journalist to foresee “the beginning of the end not just of an illusory ‘unipolar moment’ for the US, but of western supremacy in general and of Anglo-American power, in particular.” Fareed Zakaria, a widely quoted public intellectual, warns that America has become an “enfeebled” superpower and embellishes his case by observing that the world’s tallest Ferris wheel is now in Singapore and the largest casino is in Macao. For good measure he adds: “America’s success has made it sclerotic.”

Without a doubt, the United States now confronts serious problems at home and abroad. Nonetheless, recent declinist arguments carry an unmistakable echo of the past. Antecedents of these views were apparent in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and on occasion were even phrased in identical language. Indeed, declinist proclamations have appeared on and off since the late eighteenth century.

For the United States, historical as well as relatively recent comparisons provide evidence for its robustness and adaptability as a society and as a leading power. Time and again, America has faced daunting challenges and made mistakes, yet it has possessed the inventiveness and societal flexibility to adjust and respond successfully. In this regard, neither the rise of the BRICS and other regional powrs, nor competition in a globalized world economy, nor “imperial overstretch,” nor domestic weakness are by themselves bound to have the transformative effects that have been so often suggested. Despite major changes and severe challenges, these domestic and international constraints do not in themselves predetermine the end of America’s international predominance. All the same, just because America has previously overcome adversity and retained both its strength and international primacy does not guarantee that it will do so now.

Debate about America’s world role is nothing new. One notable version of it took place in the late 1980s. Paul Kennedy’s 1987 best seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” became one of the most widely cited books of that era. Kennedy cautioned that the United States ran the risk of “imperial overstretch,” which he defined not just in terms of military commitments, but in regard to the balance between resources and obligations. In a 1990 response, Joseph Nye was less pessimistic, arguing that the issue was not one of resources per se, but of policy and choice – that is, that to the extent the United States faced a problem, it was because it “lacks the will, not the wallet.”

The problem of “wallet” has since become more pressing. Even before the financial crisis that began in 2008, the historian Niall Ferguson cited the shift in America’s balance of payments and the change in its net international investment position – the difference between American-owned assets abroad and foreign-owned American assets – as a sign of deterioration. In doing so, he invoked comparisons with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago. The comparison is tempting, but as with the parallels to the British experience of the past century, its relevance is tenuous at best.

Certainly the domestic situation is more difficult now than two decades ago. Yet while these problems should not be minimized, they should not be overstated either. Contrary to what many observers would assume, the United States has managed to hold its own in globalized economic competition and its strengths remain broad and deep. For the past several decades, its share of global output has been relatively constant at between one-quarter and one-fifth of world output. According to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 1980, the United States accounted for 26.0 percent of world GDP, and in 2011, 21.5 percent. These figures are based on GDP in national currency. Alternative calculations using purchasing power parities are somewhat less favorable, but still show the United States with 19.1 percent in 2011, as contrasted with 24.6 percent in 1980.

Moreover, America benefits from a growing population and one that is aging more slowly than all its possible competitors except India. And despite a dysfunctional immigration system, it continues to be a magnet for talented and ambitious immigrants. It is a world leader in science and in its system of research universities and higher education, and it has the advantage of continental scale and resources. In short, the United States remains the one country in the world that is both big and rich.

In addition, the American military remains unmatched and, despite intense stress from a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has not suffered the disarray that afflicted it in Vietnam. This is evident in terms of indicators such as successful recruitment and performance of the volunteer force, the ongoing quality of the officer corps, and broad public support for the military as well as casualty tolerance. Moreover, in its capabilities, technology, capacity to project power, and command of the global commons, the United States has actually increased its military margin as compared with others, although with the important and challenging exception of China.

Beyond material strengths, the society itself benefits from a durable political system, rule of law, vigorous free press and information media, and a competitive and adaptable economy, as well as strong traditions of entrepreneurship and innovation, leadership and critical mass in new technology, and a history of resilience and flexibility in overcoming adversity.

The declinist proposition that America’s international primacy is collapsing as a result of the rise of other countries should also be regarded with caution. On the one hand, the United States does face a more competitive world, regional challenges, and some attrition of its relative degree of primacy. This process, or diffusion of power, is not exclusive to the post–Cold War era, but began at least four decades ago with the recovery of Europe and Japan from World War II, the rise of the Soviet Union to superpower status, and the emergence of regional powers in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Still, in contrast to other great powers that have experienced decline, the United States has held a substantially more dominant position. For example, Britain at the start of the twentieth century was already falling behind Germany and the United States, although it did manage to continue for half a century as head of a vast empire and commonwealth.

Because of the enormous margin of power the United States possessed after the end of the Cold War, it should be able to withstand erosion in its relative strength for some time to come without losing its predominant status. While it is true that the weight of important regional powers has increased, many of these are allied or friendly. Those that are not (Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela) do not by themselves constitute serious balancing against the United States and its allies. Russia occupies an intermediate position, at times acting as a spoiler, but not an outright adversary. China presents a potentially more formidable challenge, notably through its growing economic might and the rapid expansion of its military capacity, but it has not yet become a true peer competitor. In any case, and despite the burden of a decade of war in the Middle East, America continues to possess significant advantages in economic breadth and depth, science, technology, competitiveness, demography, force size, power projection, military technology, and even in learning how to carry out effective counterinsurgency, and thus retains the capacity to meet key objectives.

In sum, although the United States predominates by lesser margins, it still remains a long way from being overtaken by peer competitors. However, given profound disagreements about policy, intense partisan rancor among political elites, growing social-class division, distrust of government, and deep disagreement about foreign commitments, nonmaterial factors could prove to be a greater impediment to staying power than more commonly cited indicators of economic problems and military overstretch. The United States retains the power and capacity to play a leading world role. The ultimate questions about America’s future are likely to be those of policy and will.

Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline, by Robert J. Lieber Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Lieber.  Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion — which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master’s “Rhetoric” is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it’s their own idea) throughout his book. “He was the first person,” Leith writes of Aristotle, “really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself.”

Rhetoric is also, to be blunt, the art of talking people into things, and it flourishes in courtrooms and on campaign trails, in singles bars and television commercials, over dinner tables and in Internet forums. Leith, a British journalist and novelist, wants to revive the formal appreciation of rhetorical technique, but he acknowledges that today it’s precisely when we are most aware of rhetorical skill that we condemn it. If Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his strengths as an orator (a testimony to rhetoric’s importance if there ever was one), that same eloquence has become a stick to beat him with in the hands of his critics. Rick Santorum is typical in dismissing Obama “just a person of words.” “It seemed,” Leith writes of the 2008 election, “that though we expected politicians to make speeches, we didn’t like them to be too good at it.”

This isn’t precisely true; Obama’s supporters celebrate his speechmaking. But the potshots do illustrate the contemporary ambivalence toward smooth-talking of any kind. Whereas the ancients admired rhetoric as a consciously mastered skill, we prefer (we think) people who speak “from the heart” — if not quite spontaneously, then at the very least approximating a free outflowing of their supposedly true selves. To appear to have thought too much about what you’re saying, to be obviously conscious of it as a performance, is to seem insincere. No wonder the study of rhetoric per se has fallen by the wayside.

But of course, as Leith also points out, “being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy.” “Words Like Loaded Pistols” sports a fabulous assortment of examples of time-tested rhetorical gambits in action. Exhibit A for “anti-rhetorical rhetoric” is Sarah Palin’s taped television address following the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in Arizona. The lunatic gunman, some observers felt, had been egged on by the paramilitaristic language and imagery of right-wingers in general and Palin’s own website in particular. Leith breaks down Palin’s statement using classical rhetorical terminology, but he also holds it up as an illustration of the ironic paradoxes of anti-rhetoric. “The way she chose to defend herself against trial by media was through the media; while denying that words could be held responsible for inciting hatred and violence, she asserted that media reporting on her” was inciting hatred and violence.

In further case studies, Leith examines the rhetorical technique of everyone from Eminem and “South Park” to Frederick Douglass, the courtroom combatants in “A Few Good Men,” Richard Nixon and his famous Checkers speech and Earl Spencer in the eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana. Interstitial chapters highlight “Champions of Rhetoric”: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr., etc. (not excepting Hitler, because whatever else can be said about the man, he knew how to fire up a crowd).

Although this greatest-hits element is key to the appeal of “Words Like Loaded Pistols,” Leith also provides a brisk overview of rhetorical principles and terms — the latter of which, in tongue-twisting Greek and Latin, many readers will promptly forget. (It is amusing to learn that the lyrics to the Carpenters’ “Close to You” present a textbook specimen of hypophora.) However obscure the terminology may seem to modern readers, however, the thinking underlying it is rock solid.

And to judge by much of the public speaking and ostensibly persuasive writing one sees these days, it’s also woefully neglected. “Words Like Loaded Pistols” isn’t a how-to book, but chances are that anyone who reads it will acquire a trick or two. Many a catastrophic best-man toast or limping pitch meeting demonstrates the need for a better understanding of the elementary guidelines laid down well over 2,000 years ago: Know your audience and strive to portray yourself as one of them; adjust your style to the tenor of the occasion; consider starting with a tactical concession; and so on. The marvel is not that the old techniques still work, but that we ever persuaded ourselves that we could do without them.

According to Ian Bremmer, the author of the new book “Every Nation for Itself,” the rise of the “G-Zero” means the world has entered a transformative new phase — which will be more chaotic, uncooperative and dangerous. In his book, he charts how America assumed the burden of global leadership in the wake of World War II, and how institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the G-7 and the IMF helped it dictate the international agenda for much of the past century. He also explains how the breakdown of those (often problematic) institutions is now hurting our ability to marshal global leaders to deal with some of the greatest threats facing our planet. Bremmer, the head of a global political risk research firm who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, believes that this new dynamic could lead us to a new, more egalitarian world — or to a new Cold War.

Salon spoke to Bremmer over the phone about America’s new isolationism, the cyber-attack threat and why China will never replace the USA.

You start off the book by talking about the Copenhagen climate summit. What does the outcome of that conference tell us about the changing dynamics in the world?

Frankly, the only success that was had at that summit was that Queen Margaret of Denmark managed to avoid sitting next to Mugabe from Zimbabwe. There had been so much buildup to this summit, that the climate is incredibly important and we’ve all finally gotten to the point where we agree that something needs to be done. It seemed like the classic area that you could get some form of global agreement on. Of course we came away with absolutely nothing.

Following the Copenhagen summit we haven’t pushed harder to get stuff done, we’ve actually just moderated our expectations. Every country is prioritizing its own very strong agenda and there’s an absence of acceptance of what the global road map should look like, what the global architecture should look like. This dynamic is increasingly true in so many aspects of the world, whether we talk about the election of a new president of the World Bank, or on how you fund the IMF (and what you do with the money once it’s there), global trade initiatives, security issues in places like Syria, sanctions on Iran, bailing out the Europeans.  I mean, really the principal dynamic in the world today is the fact that there just isn’t anyone driving the bus.  We don’t have a G-20. We have a G-Zero.

Why is the G-7 an anachronism?

The G-7 is an anachronism in the same way that the United Nations Security Council is an anachronism, in the same way that the old structure of the IMF and the World Bank is an anachronism. All of that stuff basically came out of World War II, when the United States was the dominant power in the world, and it created a world order using its own capital, using its allies, building up its allies, prioritizing its values and its interests. And that world order functioned very well for us for decades but of course over the last 30 years, the underlying balance of power shifted away from this G-1 environment toward China. It hasn’t shifted to China — it’s not as if China is now the new superpower — but toward China, and away from the developed world toward the developing world, and away from debtor states toward creditor states.  When the underlying balance of power no longer in any way reflects the global architecture that you have, then at some point, clearly, a shock will come along that will be big enough to crash that system.

The end of the Soviet Union was not big enough to make that happen, and 9/11 was not big enough to make that happen, but the 2008 financial crisis was big enough. And that effectively made the G-7 an anachronism. And it did so in part, of course, because it showed some of the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-led free market system; it certainly made it harder for the Americans to rally the emerging markets behind their values and preferences. But more important, the Europeans have been almost completely absent from the global stage over the past four years, and frankly so have the Japanese, with their 17 prime ministers in 22 years. And by the way, I strongly feel this is not a book about U.S. decline. I actually don’t believe the U.S. is in decline. It’s much more a book about the fact that the United States is not going to do this stuff anymore and its allies certainly are not coming along, but nobody else is either.

What happened after World War II to propel America to this position?

Well, it wasn’t just that they helped win the war, it was that the economies and infrastructures of the other countries — both victors and vanquished – were utterly destroyed, and the United States rebuilt them. Of course, that was the Marshall Plan. And that also was MacArthur in Japan. So the U.S. basically built up both its allies as well as the vanquished Japanese who surrendered, to create folks that would support a U.S.-led global system. And that worked very effectively indeed.

In polls, more and more Americans want a kind of inward focus and less involvement in the world stage — an issue that’s also played itself out in the Republican primary. Why do you think that is? 

The reason why I make the point that this book is not about whether or not the U.S. is in decline is because it’s very clear that America is the world’s largest economy, and more important, even if it weren’t, even when China becomes the largest, richest economy, China will still be a poor country. If the Americans wanted to remove Assad from power in Syria they surely could. If America wanted to bail the Europeans out they surely could; we have the money. It’s also true that if we wanted to balance our budget, we could, but we don’t. The political will doesn’t exist for that. And so much of that has to do with the political system, and it has to do also with the inward-lookingness of the U.S.

I happen to think that there has been this significant “coming apart” within the United States of the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent economically. But that coming apart within the U.S. is also being mirrored by a coming apart globally. And that there aren’t many Americans that are prepared to support the U.S. as the world’s policeman anymore. There aren’t many Americans that are prepared to say they benefit from U.S.-led globalization. With the levels of unemployment that exist in the U.S., with manufacturing jobs that have gone away and aren’t coming back, with Katrina and New Orleans not getting rebuilt, large numbers of Americans are saying, “We do not see the benefit from all of what the U.S. has been doing internationally.” And that will make it politically inconceivable for the U.S. to do the kind of things that it did when it was putting together the old world order. I mean, Geithner can get on a plane and go to Europe and give as much advice as he wants to. But there’s nowhere near the level of political support in the United States for the Americans to pull off another Marshall Plan in Europe, or anything remotely close to that.

And even in the case of Libya, which of course is the big intervention that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, look at what actually happened. The U.S. did not want to do it. Everyone hated Gadhafi — U.S. enemies, U.S. allies. The Brits and the French said, You’ve gotta remove this guy. And only then did the U.S. say they would, and still the U.S. did not have troops on the ground. In some ways, Libya is the exception that proves the rule, that whether we’re talking about trade or climate or security or the European crisis, all of these are issues where we’re just not going to see the kind of leadership anywhere that we have historically.

I think many people would see this as a positive decline in so-called American imperialism.

Well, first of all there’s no question that American intervention on the military side has been seen as problematic. But for every country that sees it as problematic, others have seen it as something essential. You can talk about Marshall Plan, the role that the U.S. has played in the World Bank and the IMF, the importance of the Peace Corps and all of this sort of stuff – these have been organizations that generally have been very welcomed in terms of the benefit for the common good.

A few years ago, I remember reading endless magazine articles about how China was going to become the new superpower, and we’ll all be learning Mandarin in grade school. You don’t think that’s going to be the case. 

I put that into strong question and there are a number of reasons for it. The first is that for the Chinese to continue to succeed they need to fundamentally restructure both their economy and their political system. They’re aware of this. It’s an enormous challenge, it’s never been attempted with a country remotely the size of China, and they’ll need to do it relatively quickly.  First of all, there are no guarantees that they will succeed and, even assuming that they succeed, or they even succeed sufficiently to stave off various crises, when China becomes the world’s largest economy, it will still be a poor country. And I don’t think we sufficiently appreciate how different that will be. They will be focused much more on ensuring that they can provide the minimum form of employment and growth and commodity inputs for their own people. The United States is a rich country. The U.S. can easily afford to spend a lot of time helping to provide public goods, acting as a global policeman across the world, and it’s done that for over a century, again for good and for bad. The Chinese will not be prepared to play that role.

Look at what China’s doing in the Middle East: They are interested in defending very narrow interests – economic and security interests. It’s easy for the United States to say, we want to do more on the global environment, because the average American is paying attention.  The average Chinese person has a very different view of the global environment. They want a car. They want their kids to be able to have an apartment. They want a proper education. Hundreds of millions of them want to get out of absolute poverty.

The last few decades have been sort of notable, because there’s been relatively little death and conflict around the globe, compared to other periods of time in global history — a point made by the recent book, “The War on War.” What do you think the G-Zero environment means for the security of the world?

Clearly we’re going to see much more conflict in this environment. And the question is what kind of conflict it will be. I tend to not see this as a world where we’re going to have military and the sort of conventional warfare between major powers. Compared to the pre-WWII environment, there’s so much more interlinkage between the economies of countries. But having said that, we’re definitely seeing a fragmentation of the world order, compared to a globalization and statelessness that had been driven by the United States at the order of the global markets over the past decade. What does that mean? Well, first of all it means we’ll see much more cyber-conflict. Much more industrial espionage. Much more direct and overt conflict between states and corporations. More protectionism.  More industrial policy. Those sorts of things, I think we will see more conflict overall. I think that can spill over into military conflict regionally that won’t necessarily involve the United States.

In a G-Zero environment the Middle East is much more problematic. Because absent strong US, European, Japanese, Chinese or Russian intervention, what you end up having is the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Turks playing much greater roles in terms of diplomacy and political influence, economic influence, military influence.  Those countries support completely different outcomes. Clearly that means more sectarian conflict.  We’re not going to see more integration in the Middle East, we’re going to see more disintegration, more fragmentation, more confrontation.

In the book you also suggest that we’ll be see the rise of privatized warfare, using contractors like the company formerly known as Blackwater. I find that a worrisome prediction.

You know, absent U.S. intervention, you are likely to see many more local arms races, like India vs. China, for example. But you’ll also see the privatization of warfare, where countries with cash will be buying mercenaries that are well-trained, whatever they can afford, and they’ll be doing the fighting for them. And that will also be true in terms of folks that can engage in cyber-warfare and folks that can protect you from cyber-warfare. In a G-Zero environment, fighting of all sorts gets fragmented.

How does this affect our ability to deal with global warming?

Well, this is one of the problems I have today with the political debate. You’ve got so many people out there who are saying, “Global warming is horrible and we have to do something.” But it’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to. And again, it’s not as if the world has never been capable of dealing with climate problems.  You remember, we had a hole in the ozone, and I believe it was in 1976 that there was this Montreal protocol that was going to stop putting the CFCs in the atmosphere.  And it was effective.

It’s very clear that this climate issue, as you mentioned, is a much, much bigger order of baggage. It’s going to cause a lot of death, a lot of displacement. There will be winners as well. There will be folks who are successful economically out of climate change, but overall, it’s a negative for the world economy, and it is inconceivable in a G-Zero environment that you’re going to move efficiently even toward the beginning of a global solution, and so what will happen is you will have local solutions.  Local solutions will not be coordinated, they will be less efficient, and they will focus on those issues that are most important to individual governments directly. In the case of the Maldives, they’ll buy land and they’ll move. In the case of China, they’ll focus on issues that are impacting their domestic population, without worrying about what they’re doing to the global public commons in terms of emitting pollutants into the air. As they need to industrialize but they’ll focus much more on water, for example, because they desperately need that water for themselves.

And the U.S. and others will start focusing on geo-engineering — looking at what can be done to potentially artificially lower temperatures and create cloud cover and, you know, all of these sort of things which 10 years ago were fanciful but now increasingly people are starting to look into seriously.  But the issue is that those solutions will not be taken globally.  And what will be seen as a solution by one country or a set of like-minded countries might actually be seen as very strongly against the interest of other countries and other actors.

What countries do you think are going to be helped by this new G-Zero arrangement?

There are a group of countries that I think will do particularly well in this environment and I call them pivot states. The reason I focus on these pivot states is in a G-Zero environment you need to not just focus on growth — because there’s so much more volatility in the world, you need to focus on growth and resilience together. It’s countries that are able to hedge and adapt between different models of growth and integration, that don’t get captured by any individual large country [that will thrive] and certain countries are particularly good at doing that.

Canada’s really good at doing that. If Obama doesn’t want to do the Keystone pipeline, there are a lot of Chinese that want to have access to Canadian energy. As climate change occurs, the Canadians will have this northern shipping route, which will help them to have access to folks all over the world and will help them have access to Arctic resources. They sell more timber in British Columbia to China now than they do the United States, and that’s very interesting. Singapore pivots very well. Kazakhstan increasingly pivots well where Mongolia, nearby, actually doesn’t because they’re much more in the pocket of the Chinese. I would argue that Indonesia pivots relatively well, Turkey pivots quite well. Mexico doesn’t. Ukraine doesn’t.

You claim there are a few possible outcome scenarios from the G-Zero world. What are they? 

The G-Zero is not the next world order. It is a global power vacuum that is not sustainable. Something will fill it, because crises will continue to grow and not be resolved and so that very process will lead to something new.  And the question is what that something new is. And I think to understand what’s coming next there are two questions you need to answer. The first is, what will be the relationship of the United States and China toward each other: Will they be relatively cooperative or relatively competitive? And the second is how much do other countries matter; do they matter a little or a lot? If you can answer those two questions you have a really good sense of where the world is going.

The only one of my scenarios that gets you to a G-20 that actually works is one where the U.S. and China have relatively harmonious relations and other countries matter a lot. So far we are not moving in that direction. So far we’ve been moving into an environment where the U.S. and China have more confrontational relations and we’re moving toward an environment where other countries are indeed likely to play a fairly significant role. So you’ll end up with a world of regions.  That’s a much more inefficient environment and it’s one where pivoting is absolutely critical.

The other two possibilities are one where the U.S. and China have good relations and other countries don’t matter: That’s the G-2 path. That’s an environment where pivoting doesn’t matter so much but where nothing gets resolved unless it happens to be a priority on the agendas of both the United States and China.  The U.S. does relatively well in that environment, actually, and so does the dollar. The other environment is the one where no one can pivot and that’s if the U.S. and China have bad relations and other countries don’t matter very much, and that is really a bipolar cold war. It’s by far the worst of all outcomes, though it’s not actually the one I expect.

But this is very much in process. Countries are in play right now, geopolitics are in play. We are in a process of creative destruction, globally, that hasn’t occurred since after WWII.

Over the phone, curator Catherine Futter explained the show’s inspiration, lengthy gestation and throwback structure. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the treasures on display.

How did this exhibition come about? How long have you been working on it?

Well, I went to two world’s fairs: I went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and then I went to Expo ’67. So my love of world’s fairs started when I was very young. And then when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the architecture of the 1867 fair, because it was the first time that there were national pavilions … Then I worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the ’90s, and we started collecting decorative arts that had been shown at world’s fairs, and realized that they were sort of the epitome of design, of technological innovation. That got the idea bubbling forward, and then about four years ago, we partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art [in Pittsburgh], and that really got the exhibition going. That’s the timeline.

Before [the first world's fair in 1851], you had to go to different places [to see products from different countries]. If you wanted to go to trade fairs, they were national, as opposed to being about international competition and international mass communication, and dissemination of style, taste, education and, of course, manufacturing.

Why did you choose 1939 as the end date for the show?

First of all, [because it marked the beginning of] the Second World War. Second, all of the fairs really shift after that point. They become much more about ideas, and less about the products that were presented. So that seemed like a good closing point.

Can you describe how the exhibition is presented? You’re featuring works from all over the world inside the museum — but you’ve also built a real pavilion outside, right?

Exactly. The exhibition at least begins by re-creating the atmosphere of the world’s fairs. It’s still very object-driven; I shouldn’t let you think that it’s a playground or anything like that. But as you walk in, there’s a five-minute loop of vintage footage from world’s fairs from 1900 to 1939, [which shows that] these were incredibly popular, well-attended and very diverse kinds of events … The palette of the galleries changes from dark tones to tertiary tones to very bold colors — basically, white with bold accents of dark blue and orange, which were the colors of the New York 1939 fair … The whole way that the exhibition is laid out is echoing what was going on in the fairs.

We have three areas of music — not opera, not really high-style music, but things that were popular in the period. We also have some activities for our visitors; the first one involves 3-D technology in the time period of 1851-1939, because stereoscopes were introduced around 1851, and there were a lot of views of world’s fairs: the architecture, the people, buildings, the fans. People will have vintage stereo-viewers or stereo-cards to look at. And also, View-Master was introduced in 1938-39; one of the very first series was views of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 …

And finally, there’s the pavilion, which [looks at the theme of "What is innovation today?"].

The world’s fairs frequently presented new technology, but also celebrated the best of the past. How does that contrast play out in terms of the items on display here?

One of my theories is that if an object is very innovative in its style, then it tends to use very traditional materials or technologies — and if it’s very innovative in its technologies, then it tends to be more traditional in its style. Salviati glass stands, for example, [represent] the revival of 16th and 17th century Venetian glass techniques, but their scale and even some of their forms are more innovative. With the innovative techniques — like a papier mâché piano, for instance — [sometimes you see] a  more traditional form made of innovative materials. One of the things that I really like about our layout is the fact that [your encounters with the material might be sort of surprising]. A work may seem traditional to you — maybe it looks like hand-painting on a vase — but then it turns out it’s chromolithography on ceramics. Or acid etching on glass, even. It makes you think about how things were made.

I know that you gathered these objects from many different countries. Do you think it will be clear to people what they communicated about their countries of origin at the particular time that they were made?

I think one of the things that people will learn from the exhibition is that a lot of the countries — especially Japan, but even the European countries and American countries — were, by absorbing the other cultures, making them their own. So when the Japanese are catering to the Western market, their work might look Japanese to us, but to the Japanese it looks more Western. There’s a Japanese vase that is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it was purchased from the 1876 centennial. The form is Japanese; the decoration in terms of subject matter is Japanese, because it’s samurai fighting among the cherry blossoms; yet it is the Japanese doing Japanese art as seen through Western eyes, or European eyes … It would never have looked Japanese to a Japanese person. The whole palette has got purples and pinks and yellows that just weren’t even in the palette of the Japanese ceramic artists until the 1860s and ’70s, when a German chemist went to Japan, bringing German chemical glaze technology. That, to me, is the quintessential object of the exhibition — because it telegraphs to people that it’s different and new, but it’s got all kinds of other layers in it.

How did you choose which individual works to include?

There were probably tens of thousands of things we saw. Just in Nuremberg, in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, there were 1,750 objects that were purchased from the 1873 Vienna exhibition. Obviously, not all of them have made it to today, but many of them have. The exhibition’s co-curator, Jason Bush, and I went on five trips of varying length all over Europe, plus additional trips that we made independently — and then we went through collections in this country as well. We also wrote to Australia and other places further afield, but shipping costs made those objects price-prohibitive. We really let the objects drive what we were going to do. We knew that “innovation” was our key word, and through that we let what we saw out there tell us what the other themes were going to be.

There’s another important part of this, which is that these objects that we saw had already been chosen by directors and curators of museums. So they already had a process of selection. And then we, as curators in the 21st century, made that second choice. You could do a whole, completely different exhibition on gold prize winners at the fairs. Most of the juries who gave out the prizes were composed of the people who exhibited — so that would give you a very inside-manufacturing point of view. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a completely different exhibition.

One of the reasons we brought the exhibition up to 1939 is that some of the objects in the exhibition are still in production today. These object still are relevant to the way we live.

“Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939″ is on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Mo., through Aug. 19, 2012.

View the slide show