Usually FZ annoys, but this is pretty good-


"The post-American world is naturally an
unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should
not be. This will not be a world defined by the
decline of America but rather the rise of everyone
else. It is the result of a series of positive trends
that have been progressing over the last 20
years, trends that have created an international
climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity
know.
That's not the world that people perceive. We are
told that we live in dark, dangerous times.
Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation,
financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and
illegal immigrants all loom large in the national
discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China,
Russia are all threats in some way or another.
But just how violent is today's world, really? A
team of scholars at the University of Maryland
has been tracking deaths caused by organized
violence. Their data show that wars of all kinds
have been declining since the mid-1980s and
that we are now at the lowest levels of global
violence since the 1950s. Deaths from terrorism
are reported to have risen in recent years. But on
closer examination, 80 percent of those
casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq,
which are really war zones with ongoing
insurgencies—and the overall numbers remain
small. [Ed. Note: Emphasis ours.]
Looking at the evidence, Harvard's polymath
professor Steven Pinker has ventured to
speculate that we are probably living "in the most
peaceful time of our species' existence. "Why
does it not feel that way? Why do we think we
live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as
violence has been ebbing, information has been
exploding. The last 20 years have produced an
information revolution that brings us news and,
most crucially, images from around the world all
the time. The immediacy of the images and the
intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to
produce constant hype. Every weather
disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every
bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS.
Because the information revolution is so new,
we—reporters, writers, readers, viewers—are all
just now figuring out how to put everything in
context.We didn't watch daily footage of the two
million people who died in Indochina in the
1970s, or the million who perished in the sands
of the Iran-Iraq war ten years later. We saw little
of the civil war in the Congo in the 1990s, where
millions died. But today any bomb that goes off,
any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is
documented by someone, somewhere and
ricochets instantly across the world. Add to this
terrorist attacks, which are random and brutal.
"That could have been me," you think.
Actually, your chances of being killed in a
terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller
than drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel
like that.The threats we face are real. Islamic
jihadists are a nasty bunch—they do want to
attack civilians everywhere. But it is increasingly
clear that militants and suicide bombers make up
a tiny portion of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims.
They can do real damage, especially if they get
their hands on nuclear weapons. But the
combined efforts of the world's governments
have effectively put them on the run and continue
to track them and their money. Jihad persists, but
the jihadists have had to scatter, work in small
local cells, and use simple and undetectable
weapons. They have not been able to hit big,
symbolic targets, especially ones involving
Americans. So they blow up bombs in cafés,
marketplaces, and subway stations. The problem
is that in doing so, they kill locals and alienate
ordinary Muslims. Look at the polls. Support for
violence of any kind has dropped dramatically
over the last five years in all Muslim countries."

Fareed Zakaria
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/