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The Eastern Economic Miracle is now a fact of history. For the past decade the major countries of the Orient, representing half of the world's population, have been growing at phenomenal rates, in some cases at up to five times the pace of their Western counterparts. China alone has grown at an average rate of ten percent per year over the past decade. Given the staggering size of China, humankind has never before witnessed such a dramatic transformation. What does this mean for the West? Let's see:
First, according to a World Bank report, by the year 2020, China will have overtaken the United States as the largest economic power in the world. Britain will rank in the mid-teens, below Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea. This means that if present trends continue, the West will have lost its economic preeminence to the East. Numbers and rankings aside, this will have tremendous repercussions on the political and military balance of the world.
What is potentially catastrophic, and what has provided the impetus for Spicer to write this book, is the prospect of an increasingly confident but still resentful East and an inward-looking, defensive West confronting each other. Whether this is done consciously or by default does not matter. That way lies the risk of war of a devastating kind.
