The power of the world always works in circles.
Sovereignty will fall victim to the flow of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, dollars, drugs, viruses, and e-mails… Sovereign states will increasingly measure their vulnerability not to one another but to forces of globalization beyond their control.
All recent U.S. presidents have learned the hard way that, despite their immense power, they remain at the mercy of uncontrollable global forces that render their personal views and campaign promises largely irrelevant.
For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.
Globalization is not a monolithic force but an evolving set of consequences - some good, some bad and some unintended. It is the new reality.
No nation can control its own destiny. They are played off against each other in the global economy.
I believe that nationalism is a very strong force, but there are other forces operating; there are tendencies pushing towards a larger picture, especially in Europe, I think; but I still think nationalism is real.
The forces of global integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away the established order of things.
Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.
I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go.
No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced.
There is a pressing need to integrate the study of international economics with the study of international politics to deepen our comprehension of the forces at work in the world.
