Hope abounds on the world stage

Looking at the world stage these days one can be forgiven for getting a tad depressed. Escalating global tensions, the chaos of Iraq, unprecedented antipathy towards America, rising Muslim fundamentalism, increasing partisan polarization and bitterness at home, the list goes on and on. But perhaps, as the saying goes, it's always darkest before the dawn.

If one steps back and looks at the broader global picture, away from the hotspots of the war on terror, there is indeed much to be celebrated.

From Beijing to Bombay, Cambodia to Cape Town, the evidence is crystal clear: Modernity is triumphing. The very questions we are debating today should suggest to us that things have changed for the better.

Isn't it nice to live in a world where instead of being told, as our parents and grandparents generations were, "Finish your plate, children are starving in China!" we are asked, "Is China taking too many of our high-tech jobs?"

If Americans speak to someone on the phone in India these days, that person is far more likely to be a computer technician than a charity worker talking about sponsoring a poor child.

Of course these countries and other developing nations still have many, many serious problems — AIDS and massive poverty chief among them. But it is still worth noting the historic and historically rapid modernization that has, in India and China alone, brought billions of new citizens into the interconnected global village.

The main holdout from these global developments, as we all by now know so well, has been the Middle East.

The combustible mix of religion, politics and history has left that region mired in ancient hates and modern conspiracy theories.

The great tragedy for America is that we risk becoming so myopically obsessed with terrorism and the Middle East and hubristically enraptured with our own tremendous power, that we alienate ourselves from the rest of the world, where time hasn't stopped just because we're fighting al-Qaeda.

Polls indicate that the U.S. obsession with terrorism (understandable, of course, after 9/11) has lowered America's stature in Asia (mainly to China's benefit), and let our Latin American neighbors drift away from democracy toward leftist populism.

But our natural focus on our own nation and destiny should not delude us into thinking that our fate as a superpower is synonymous with the fate of the planet.

Whether we reclaim the mantle of world leadership or totter and dwindle as an empire, the political, economic, social and cultural path that began in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian West and was spread around the globe (often brutally) first by the European empires and then by the American one, is now firmly ensconced as the path of global modernity.

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The last truly global threat to this system, Communism, has been defeated. Communism was such a significant threat because it was a universal ideology and made a competing claim to the mantle of modernity against democratic capitalism. Radical Islam, in contrast, is sectarian not universal in its appeal (i.e., only to Muslims), and its vision is of a medieval, Taliban-style society that the vast majority of the planet, including most Muslims, has little interest in. Thus the current threat of Islamism will eventually be defeated as well.

The true threats to our planet in the next centuries will require genuine global cooperation. From global warming to weapons of mass destruction, rogue nations and still endemic global poverty and disease, our problems today are transnational.

The days of splendid isolation for any nation are long over.

But even as we consider these threats, it is vital that we recognize the many positive changes occurring around us. That we now ask "Should gays be allowed to marry?" instead of "Should gays be imprisoned or executed?" is, I believe, a proud testament to our civilization and its accomplishments.

That these values have spread globally, though certainly not universally, is a great achievement of our era.

As future national and global leaders it is our duty, and in the spirit of Princeton, to keep these flames of liberty, justice and tolerance burning brightly so that whatever the current darkness, the coming dawn will shine brighter than ever.

Matthew Schonfield is a Wilson School major from Los Angeles, Calif. You can reach him at mschonfi@princeton.edu.