At the end of the 1970s and until the early 1990s, the prophets of doom enjoyed a boom. Every little fortune-teller announced the arrival of a ‘Pacific’ or ‘Asian Cen- tury’ that was to be just around the corner. The common fear of suffering a loss, of having to give up an accustomed position led people to buy books that visualized the ‘yellow danger’.

   But something seems to have been miscalculated. „Die Vereinigten Staaten, an- geblich dem Untergang geweiht, haben sich in einer beispiellosen nationalen An- strengung wieder an die Spitze des Fortschritts gesetzt.“[340]  (transl.: The United States, allegedly doomed, have put themselves again at the head of progress in an unheard of national tour-de-force. -B.Wahler)

   What has happened to the challengers that makes the incumbent seem so firm in his place?

   Before the stock exchanges brought them back to consciousness, the tiger econo- mies and their leaders flooded Western books and management courses with talk of  ‘Asian values’. According to the doomsday version, these were to substitute the set of values the American nation had pro pagated with every treaty it signed, with every shore it landed on, with every crusade it embarked on.
Now finally, it is wide open for everyone to see what these acclaimed ‘Asian values’ are. Depriving the people of their freedom of speech, government without the con- sent of the governed, accountable to no-one except their bank account, nepotism, oppression, corruption, dishonesty and autocrats for whose benevolence one has to hope and whose malice one has to fear.  The stock market has shown that contin- uous growth is not enough. Demonstations and riots, often violently crushed to pre- serve a Suharto's or Mahatir's 'law and order', have shown that a job and raising
standard of living is not enough. It has to be accompanied by individual freedoms and democracy.
An environment favorable to individuals is an environment favorable to investment . Those countries will now have their chance to act accordingly. Either they will join the Western (European developped and American implemented) basic values with adaptions to their own cultural background or they and their peoples will suffer form unrest, upheavals and chaos. It has finally been shown that those claiming that 'freedom is not so important' and disguised this as being 'the way things work over here', are those who claim all freedom for themselves.

   Yet what has made the United States so dominant, is their spirit of renewal. More than seven years ago, Henry Grunwald, former editor in chief of Time Magazine, addressed the same question.[341] He set certain conditions that would have to be fulfilled in order to prolong the American predominance of the World. And it ap- pears that the United States had set out to follow just that course.
American schools are being connected to the Internet, more money is being spent on teachers and teaching. Inner cities are being opened again for business and enter- tainment, jobs are being created at a pace unthinkable some years ago, industry has overcome its structural flaws and is now adapted to the process called globaliza- tion. Community and Neighborhood work is the efficient alternative to government interference. There may not be all right in the United States, but the nation seems to have mastered a turn-around. In just about every field, the United States has proven that it still can be a ‘citty upon a hill’.

   But America’s influence in the world - its influence on the world has still many other facets.

   Consider the many goods one comes into contact with every day - here in Europe as well as a consumer in Indonesia, Chile or South Africa. From cornflakes to com- putergames, from Barbie dolls to Backstreet Boys, from amusement parks to athle- te’s shoes; all these products as ordinary as they may seem  convey a message.

   The message of what America is like.
It leaves no one untouched.
It is not just any country !

   We can talk about it for hours without ever having actually been there. Movies and TV series, cartoons and rock songs tell us about it, or even show us directly; McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, CocaCola and Budweiser give us a taste of it, let us pour it and devour it; Rambo and Donald Duck, Al Bundy and Leonardo di Caprio make us laugh or cry, show us role models or despised criminals... But all of them are American.

   Yes, this is infiltration and it leaves no-one untouched. We may not like what we see,  we may adore it, but there is nothing in between. There is a worldwide know- ledge about what America is. All over the globe this knowledge is aquired and amended day by day. And thus, America is the part of the world that we all share in our minds. In our dreams or our nightmares. In our hopes or our fears. America has made use of its century and become -as young a nation as it may be- a part of a truely global heritage.

   And its heart is beating fast. America’s economy is the strongest in a generation, as President Clinton boasts, its twice as large as the one of its immediate competitor. But the  more important indicator is something different, since we assess America’s future.

   Think for a minute. How many American companies can you enumerate that have made it big and that are no older than say 20 years... Microsoft, of course, Intel, Compaq, Sun, Motorola, Delta Airlines, CNN, ... it could go on like this for some time, while if one picked any other country you probably won’t get further than two. But it’s not only the big names, America has a leading position in virtually all industries that are considered to enjoy rapid growth in the next few years. Communication, bio-technology, medicine and health industries, entertainment ...ready for the next stages of the industrial revolution.America is driven by the industries that drive the integration of the world’s economies, America drives the globalization.

   The next century will also be an American Century. If the United States was to vanish today from the face of the earth, there nevertheless would be so many people on this world whose backgrounds are partly ‘Americanized’, who had come into contact with many things American and would not lose the impressions that resul- ted thereof.

   But worst-case scenarios excluded, there is actually no nation on earth nor any community or union of nations at this point that could from now on take over the United States role and make the next century its own. America disposes of incredi- ble economic strength, of immense political reach and influence, of unrivalled mili- tary power, it is the only power that is truely global in the sense that its policies are effected by events in far off places and its policies effect any place on earth. It is the only nation that has a -no matter how strange, twisted or unrealistic- coherent, glo- bal foreign policy, with interests and stakes, hopes and fears, objectives and strate- gies in all regions of the world.

   Its ‘watchdog’ and ‘policeman’ powers put aside, the United States is the world power -if we like it or not - of our hearts and minds as well.