1990s "Mindset of Global Convergence" Was Absolutely Right

I heard this quote on a Meet the Press interview with Obama from this past Sunday. It's from an article critical of Obama.

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn't matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama's lofty peroration. --David Brooks

I completely believed in this global convergence, and I'm sad it hasn't come true yet. Technology was going to obviate the concept of spoils of war. The nation state would decline. War would end. We engineers would all be deka-milionaires. It's not going the way I had hoped, but I don't want to go back to the bad old days. If we fight competition for resources with power politics, i.e. more fierce struggle for scarce resources, we all lose. Some people will win one more generation of an unsustainable lifestyle, but that's not worth fighting for.

In the absence of a better plan, what Brooks dismissively calls the 1990s mindset of "global convergence" is the correct mindset with which to approach foreign policy. The Bush policy has been to argue it's a completely new world now because the world has never seen a massacre of innocent civilians prior to the Sept 11 attacks.

That's the old world. The new world is still a work in progress. The 1990s mindset of global convergence is a good place to start. Obama seems to understand how human history has operated and to understand that maybe another world is possible within our lifetime.