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America becomes number two, we will still have a better world. In many ways, the world is “converging” to American values and standards, as I explain in The Great Convergence. The global middle class is booming, interstate war 1s waning, and never before have people traveled and communicated across the world so easily. These changes are creating common values and norms across the world. Education and scientific reasoning, for example, are enabling people the world over to speak with a common language. However, while humanity is well on its way to combating absolute poverty and interstate warfare, other problems are surfacing. Preventing and curtailing transnational issues like climate change, human and drug trafficking, and financial crises require cooperation among nation states, yet this is not happening. A simple analogy illustrates this. Before the era of modern globalization, humankind was like a flotilla of more than 100 separate boats in their separate countries. The world needed a set of rules then to ensure that the many boats did not collide and facilitate their cooperation on the high seas if they chose to do so. The 1945 rules-based order strived to do this, and despite some obvious failures, it succeeded in producing a relatively stable global order for more than 50 years. Today, the 7 billion people who inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than 100 separate boats. Instead, they live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive responsibility for one cabin. No captain or crew cares for the boat as a whole. The world is now sailing into increasingly turbulent waters with no captain or crew at the helm. The Great Convergence echoes the themes of Clinton’s 2003 Yale speech. It’s in the interest of all — particularly great powers — to strengthen institutions of global governance so that we’re not sailing blindly into choppy waters without a captain. The National Intelligence Council recently projected that in 2030 Asia would overtake the Western world economically, technologically and militarily. When China becomes a world superpower in a matter of decades, the United States and Europe will want to ensure that China plays by the rules. But in order to make international organizations like the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank more credible and effective, they must HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018214