No, not necessarily.
Read the following and please share your thoughts.
We shouldn't want to have the dominant economic position we do now, because the only way we can do it with only 300 million people on a planet of six and half billion, is if there's a huge unacceptable number of poor people in the world.
The Indians have a billion people, and their economy's growing rapidly, but their per capita income's still about $600 dollars.
The Chinese are more than double that, but they still have vast swaths of poor people.
And yet, since intelligence and ability are equally distributed throughout the world, as other people get their act together, by definition, if they have more people than we do, as a nation, we won't be dominant.
The Chinese, in the next two or three days, probably, will have a trillion dollars in cash reserves. And we have a combined annual budget and trade deficit of a trillion dollars. We had to borrow money from them to pay for my tax cut. As you know, I don't think that's a very good idea. But, I think we have to be mindful of that.
There was a view that prevailed in the current government for several years, although I think its changing now, that since we had this magic moment we should use all this power to try to solve all the problems, get rid of all the bad guys... change everything. The problem is that, a humble view of human nature recognizes that there will always be problems with us, and that what we have to do is create a system in which we can solve them together.
So, I'll give you this one example:
Let's assume you support the war in Iraq and the conflict in Afghanistan and a $500 billion a year military budget.
We only spend about 20, maybe $25 billion now on foreign assistance of all kinds.
But, we KNOW HOW to help people alleviate poverty, fight AIDS, TB and malaria... we know what it would cost to put all 130 million kids in the world who don't go to school in school, in a way that would serve our foreign policy interests. If you look at Pakistan, for example, we gave them a lot of money to buy airplanes, we gave them a lot of airplanes, and we didn't give them any money to put their kids in schools, so when poor people couldn't afford the schools they sent their kids to the Madrassas, and the rest is history.
If we were to increase that by $30 billion a year... if we were to give $50 billion dollars a year in foreign assistance, or if we were to go up to seven-tenths of one percent (0.7%) of our income in foreign assistance, which is the international goal (and you can work out the numbers in an $11 trillion dollar GDP), in my opinion, that would do more than almost anything we could do to create a world with more partners and fewer adversaries... and, a world where once we're no longer dominant, we'll still be a very important... I hope we'll always be the BEST country in the world, the most important country in the world, but we will not have a dominant position.
And dominance, as you see from the current difficulties in Iraq, is a way over-rated concept, anyway.
So, I just think that we need to ask ourselves always, 'what kind of return will we get on an investment to have the kind of world we want our children and grandchildren to live in, if we are no longer dominant?'
And, in effect, we already know that the benefits of dominance are ambiguous at best.
So, that's just one example. I wish if we... $30 billion dollars more and we could pay our fair share of trying to meet the U.N. Millennium Development goals, it would change the attitude toward America, and it would create a world, I think, that would be nicer for us to live in if we can't throw our weight around.