Noah Smith, Columnist

We’ll Miss Pax Americana Once It’s Gone

The postwar structure set up by the U.S. made the world safer and more prosperous.

September 12, 2019 at 9:30 AM EDT

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

And then there were two...
Photographer: Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty Images

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Pax Americana – the global state of relative order, peace and free trade that characterized the era of U.S. economic and military supremacy – may be on the verge of unraveling. And if it does, it will have grave economic consequences.

The first reason Pax Americana is endangered is economic. In 2001, the U.S. represented about 32% of global economic output, measured at market exchange rates. A decade later it was almost 10 percentage points lower:

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