Asia

It is now a foregone conclusion that China’s economy will become the biggest in the world sometime very soon. According to the World Bank, the size of China’s economy is $10.1 trillion, compared with $14.6 trillion for the U.S., based on purchasing power parity (which adjusts exchange rates to account for the different prices people pay for goods and services across countries). But China is narrowing the gap in a hurry. Over the past 10 years, the annual real growth of China’s gross domestic product averaged 10.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent in the U.S.

As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks passed, Americans are searching for a new narrative to understand their country’s role in the world. But far more than declared principles or personalities, America’s place in the world is shaped by what it does in other places. Especially overseas, societies judge us by our actions rather than our words.

Ten years to the day after American forces entered Afghanistan to hunt Al Qaeda, the United States faces a severely weakened but resilient foe. Osama Bin Laden is dead. The cleric who inspired many jihadists from his perch in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, is too.

Some want to declare the fight against Al Qaeda over and done. We won, they say. Move on.

Wrong. The ugly reality is that Al Qaeda will be a lingering menace for years to come. The organization has been largely broken - but the ideology will continue to motivate people to kill.

Dick Cheney should no longer be allowed to appear on network TV talk shows. The issue here is not one of ideology or censorship, but rather of compassion and pity. The former vice president has long been a disgrace to his political office; now he is also an embarrassment to himself.

As part of building the stock of knowledge for the Savings for the Poor Innovation and Knowledge Network (SPINNAKER), the Global Assets Project partnered with MicroSave to conduct the first exploratory savings landscape country study. The goal of the study was to not only capture the range of savings products for the poor and identify opportunities for further innovative development, but also to help develop data gathering instruments and approaches and identify gaps for future research.

Just shy of 10 years ago, on Sept. 12, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. and its allies would "go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world" and "get it by its branch and root" so that it could "be brought to an end." Things haven't worked out that way.

Judged solely on outcomes, the decade-long war on terrorism has been a rousing success. Al Qaeda has been chased out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its leader and most of his lieutenants are either captured or dead. The organization is on the brink of “strategic defeat,” according to both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the director of the CIA. Across the Middle East, support for jihadist violence has plummeted. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not mounted one successful strike on American territory—and has failed even to pull off an attack against U.S.

Henry Kissinger's 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? opens with the observation that "[a]t the dawn of the new millennium, the United States is enjoying a preeminence unrivaled by even the greatest empires of the past.

Of all the formulations deployed in recent years to describe the emerging world order, G-2 is probably the worst and most dangerous.

Americans don’t like the idea of another rival so quickly achieving strategic parity and influence, and the Chinese are uncomfortable with such a high-level responsibility commensurate with their weight.

The U.S.-China relationship can hardly be described as agreeable, progressive, or even productive. And yet people keep coming back to the idea of a G-2 because the alternatives can seem so inefficient.