Europe's Big Test

During much of the last decade, the view from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has been remarkably unvarying. It has looked something like this: In the foreground, a geriatric, somewhat insecure Europe groped its way toward more and more extensive economic integration. Further to the east lay the vast and messy ruins of postcommunist Russia. Asian tigers like South Korea and Thailand, once the 1990s' hot investment tickets, had imploded by 1998. Japan seemed to reel from crisis to crisis, unable to recover from the bursting of its economic bubble at the end of the 1980s, and the China market was more of a promise than a reality. Towering over the entire landscape was the U.S.

America has been the globe's one "hyperpower." Indeed, that memorable Star Trek-like term was coined in early 1998 by French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine to describe the overwhelming political, economic, and cultural might of the U.S. over the last decade. The world after the cold war seemed to have an unmistakably American accent, whether it was in the way Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. dominated the unfolding Information Age or the virtually unchallenged authority wielded by the U.S. military and diplomats. And fittingly, the decade began with the greatest show of strategic might since World War II, the U.S.-led gulf war coalition against Iraq.