The Post-American World

Since the year 2000, there has been an endless parade of political crises around the world, yet the global economy has, for the most part, improved. In the wake of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel’s stock market surpassed what it was before the war. The Iraq War was politically devastating for the Middle East, but Iraq’s neighbors all became more prosperous in its wake, not less. Part of the explanation is that despite the onslaught of bad headlines, organized violence is much less a part of today’s world than in the past. 

Contemporary mass media might create the impression that the world is worse off than it is because there is immediate and widespread knowledge of awful events when they occur. Terrorist violence is specifically designed to gain media coverage and shock a wide audience, but the actual number of victims remains fairly low. The threat of terrorism is a real one, as 9/11 and many deadly attacks since have attested, but government action is typically enough to contain the threat to a manageable degree. Al Qaeda had hoped that the Iraq War would be a battleground on which to defeat the West, but instead, it turned Sunni Muslims against Shi’a Muslims, alienating many local people whom they tried to attract to their cause along with respected Islamic scholars.