The U.s. and Rising Powers

In 1999, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, the meltdown of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund spooking the markets and economic crises in Russia and Brazil, the cover of Time magazine featured “The Committee to Save the World”: the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the secretary and deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury. With the cold war over and with what U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1997–2001) termed the “indispensable nation” enjoying a unipolar moment of primacy on the world stage, the conceit of the magazine cover—that the U.S. was the world’s sole great power—did not seem much of a stretch. Now, just a decade later, that conceit seems the relic of a bygone era. While there is no quesThe likely emergence of China and India as new major global players—similar to the rise of Germany in the 19th century and the U.S. in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those of the previous two centuries. In the same way that commentators refer to the 1900s as the ‘American Century,’ the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world, led by China and India, come into their own. National Intelligence Council Mapping the Global Future (2007)