The Conduct of American Diplomacy

 

ETWEEN 1945, WHEN WORLD WAR II ENDED, and 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, we lived in a bipolar world. Since 1991, the United States has been the only superpower. Remarkable opportunities open to a nation with global reach, but with the opportunities come responsibilities and burdens. Diligent leadership from the global power proves essential to maintaining international order, resolving crises, and enabling human progress. And the problems have become more complex and less tractable. This essay will sketch the world America faced in 1950, and the world it faces in the millennium of 2000. It will examine the performance of the American people and their government at those two junctures, and will speculate on what the next half-century may bring in the foreign relations of the United States.

Introduction

There has always been a thread of self-sufficiency in the American character, a preference for remaining independent of other nations, uninvolved in other peoples’ problems. George Washington’s farewell address of 7 September 1796 is often cited:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

Self-absorption is not surprising in a population of immigrants who abandoned other continents to find their own new life. For 150 years, Americans were preoccupied advancing their frontiers across a continent. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans provided natural barriers. When you can travel 3,000 miles speaking English, foreign languages and foreign countries seem less relevant.

The American market became so huge that American producers were hard pressed to supply it. American manufacturers lagged in adapting products to the tastes and needs of overseas consumers. As late as the 1970’s, while Japanese automobile manufacturers captured more and more of the American market, Detroit still resisted building cars for export with the steering wheel on the right. Only in the last thirty years has production for markets abroad become of central importance in the American scheme of things.

Historically, the trauma of war has reinforced America’s intuitive tendency to keep to itself. The United States resisted involvement in World War I for as long as it could, and then, following the war, demobilized rapidly and turned inwards, rejecting participation in the League of Nations which its own president had sponsored. The high tariffs of the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 insulated American industry from the stimulus of foreign competition, and limited the access of American consumers to inexpensive foreign goods. The United States seemed to prefer isolation.

America remained aloof as Hitler advanced across Europe. Defeat of the democracies would have imperiled the United States, but year after year Americans equivocated and delayed, until their hand was forced by the Japanese.

When the Second World War ended in 1945, the United States demobilized urgently, turning with relief to domestic concerns, and was at first inattentive to the impending Soviet threat. There were 12.1 million Americans in uniform in 1945. One year later, this number had dropped to three million and continued rapidly to decline, while the Soviets maintained their far larger armies. But the aggressive behavior and the unmistakable expansionism of the Soviet Union obliged the United States to change course, and it did so.

During nearly half a century of Cold War, the United States set aside its inclination to stand apart from the world in order to compete vigorously with the Soviet Union. Political partisanship, normally inherent in a two-party democracy, was largely suspended in regard to foreign policy and national security. Now, as we approach the year 2000, both the international agenda and the circumstances of international relations have changed dramatically. American engagement in world affairs, and steadfast American leadership, are now even more necessary than they were during the Cold War.

However, in the absence of a clear foreign threat, and without robust leadership in Washington, the old American predisposition to concentrate upon problems at home, and to allocate resources to domestic needs at the expense of international matters, has re-emerged. This is a troubling phenomenon. How long it persists will bear upon the international position and the welfare of the United States in the next fifty years.

The United States and the World at Mid-Century

Between the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the invasion of South Korea (June 1950), the United States, already the world’s largest economy, transformed itself from a reluctant participant in European and Asian affairs into a committed global power and the leader of the free world. These five years — 1945 to 1950 — were a watershed in American history, comparable to the periods 1776 to 1789 and 1861 to 1865.

A generation of great American leaders — Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, Acheson, Truman, Eisenhower — had learned from their experience following World War I, when the allies’ harsh punishment of Germany had contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism. The League of Nations, ill-designed and without American support, had failed. Protectionism had impeded economic growth. Even in the midst of World War II, Americans were seeking ways to prevent a repetition of the earlier errors.

In the Moscow Declaration of October 1943, the United States, United Kingdom, the USSR, and China called for a new and stronger world organization to replace the League. The United Nations Charter was negotiated in San Francisco in the spring of 1945 and became effective in January 1946. In response to American leadership (and the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) the UN was seated in New York.

Similarly, at the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, which prepared for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to be established in Washington the following year, the American delegation under Dean Acheson worked for an open and global economic system. They believed — correctly — that this would benefit the United States. Three years later, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established a standing mechanism to reduce trade barriers.

Franklin Roosevelt, at Yalta and then during the two months of life remaining to him, closed his eyes to mounting evidence of Soviet post-war intentions. He was determined to maintain grounds for cooperation with his wartime ally and, despite repeated warnings from Winston Churchill, believed he could work with “Uncle Joe.” Harry Truman, although indignant about Soviet duplicity over Poland, apparently felt the same after his first meeting with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference (July 1945). Truman learned while at the conference that America had successfully tested the atomic bomb, and he immediately informed Stalin. From Potsdam, Truman authorized use of the bomb against Japan, which ended the war three weeks later.

By mid-1946, in light of Soviet actions and the deep concern and mistrust expressed by American diplomats (particularly Averill Harriman and his deputy George Kennan in Moscow), American opinion began to harden against Soviet expansionism, the harsh domination of satellite countries in Eastern Europe, and Russian manipulation of communist parties further to the west.

In early 1947, the British informed the United States Government that they could no longer afford the military and economic backing essential to prevent Greece and Turkey from slipping under Soviet control. On February 27, Truman called Congressional leaders, including notably Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, to the White House, where Marshall and Acheson explained the nature of the crisis and the likelihood that if Greece fell to communism other countries would follow. There was bipartisan support for the defense of democracy and freedom. This thesis became the Truman Doctrine, and Congress voted the substantial appropriations requested.

Events moved rapidly. At the Harvard Commencement in June 1947 General Marshall proposed his plan for the reconstruction of Europe, involving a massive expenditure of $17 billion. Congress approved after long debate in April 1948. The Soviets , although nominally invited to participate, declined, hardening the East–West split. George Kennan’s “X” article in the summer of 1947 in Foreign Affairs advocated determined, systematic containment of Soviet expansionism, a doctrine which in essence was to guide the United States for the next four and a half decades.

In July 1947, Congress passed the landmark National Security Act, which established a unified Department of Defense, the National Security Council system, and the Central Intelligence Agency, reforms which were to prove crucial to effective American prosecution of the Cold War.

When the Soviet Union imposed a blockade of surface access to Berlin in June 1948, the United States responded with the brilliantly successful Berlin Airlift. The United States was now determined to stand up to the USSR. The North Atlantic Treaty and the establishment of NATO were ratified overwhelmingly by the Senate in July 1949. This completed the alliance system which, under firm American leadership, would permit the West to prevail over the coming forty-two years of Cold War. One other achievement of this remarkable era should be cited: the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which assured a professional, disciplined and effective American diplomatic service.

Thus, by 1950, five tumultuous years of events and decisions had forged a United States unified in its determination to block the expansion of Soviet power, braced to allocate the resources needed, comfortable with the ideological underpinning of its strategy, equipped and able to lead the free world in a sustained test of strength and diplomacy. America had overcome, at least for a time, its inborn preference to remain aloof from international contention. When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States was prepared to remobilize, and it worked skillfully through the United Nations to legitimize its stand against communist belligerence.

HE BERLIN WALL FELL IN 1989, and in 1991 the Soviet Union simply broke apart, much as George Kennan had expected would happen if the West could hold firm to a policy of containment. The United States breathed a sigh of relief, and, once the Gulf War was over, turned its attention to domestic problems. Politicians debated how best to apply the budget savings of disarmament, which were termed the “peace dividend”: on health? education? the budget deficit? tax reduction?

Most American forces overseas in Europe and Asia were brought home. The defense budget was reduced by a third in a few years’ time. Unfortunately, appropriations for the conduct of foreign relations were cut even more. Between the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980’s and 1995 , there was a reduction of over 50 percent in constant dollars in the Function 150 Account of the U.S. Federal budget. These are the appropriations allocated to the State Department, the Foreign Service, our overseas embassies, public diplomacy, arms control, foreign aid, the Peace Corps, the Export-Import Bank, and payments to international organizations. As of Fiscal Year 1999, the budget projections of both the Congress and the Clinton Administration will force a further reduction of 12 percent in these resources over the next five years.

The result has been a retraction in American official presence abroad, in the recruitment and training of Foreign Service officers, in the basic infrastructure of American diplomacy. Between 1992 and 1997, the United States closed thirty-six overseas embassies and consulates.

Unlike multinational corporations and the Department of Defense, the State Department and embassies abroad — although their work is grounded upon information and communication — lack up-to-date information technology: teleconferencing capability, enciphered e-mail systems, ready electronic access to key information and data bases in foreign countries. A report on the advocacy of U.S. overseas interests by fourteen distinguished Americans¹ has recommended an urgent appropriation of $400 million to redesign and modernize the nation’s diplomatic information technology and communications systems. While inadequate resources are the central problem, the Department of State has not been well managed. In the second half of the twentieth century, the only Secretary of State to pay sustained attention to the organization and infrastructure of American diplomacy was George Shultz.

National security is supported and defended by our diplomatic corps, our intelligence assets, and our armed forces. Their interlocking functions make up a system analogous to the meshing of land, air, and sea components within the military services. Diplomacy is prevention, our first line of defense. If we can resolve international differences through discussion and negotiation, we do not have to send our forces into battle and risk their lives. If diplomacy is weak or inadequate, troops may have to be deployed prematurely. Yet the international affairs (diplomacy) budget is treated as a domestic appropriation and as part of discretionary funding, which will remain the essential target for cuts as long as entitlement programs are not touchable and defense/intelligence are addressed separately under the “National Security” rubric.

The State Department, for budget consideration, is linked with the departments of Justice and Commerce, and so must compete with the domestic political constituencies of small business, the judiciary, law enforcement, the war on drugs, and so forth. Small wonder, in the absence of the sort of life and death threat earlier posed by the Soviet Union, and without strong presidential leadership, that appropriations for the conduct of diplomacy have plummeted since 1992.

Meanwhile, the world becomes more and more interdependent, and diplomacy is as involved with economic and social issues as it is with national security. Financial markets are intertwined, as we learned from the Asian crisis of 1997/98. The United States is the world’s largest trading nation. Exports now account for a third of America’s real economic growth, and have created one million new jobs in this country over the last few years. Overseas markets are pivotal for cereal and soybean producers of the Midwest and plains states. American consumers benefit from a diversity of foreign products; manufacturers depend on the timely arrival of components produced abroad. Cyberspace does not know national borders. The overseas travel of American businessmen, students, and tourists continues to increase (although there are no longer American consulates to support them if needed in, e.g., Lyons, Bordeaux, Genoa, or Palermo).

The timing is bad for a decline in America’s diplomatic readiness. At the dawn of the new millennium, American foreign policy seems less manageable than it was during the Cold War. The Soviet threat was a yardstick against which to measure each issue. Whether the challenge arose in Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo, Central America, the Middle East, or Afghanistan, we knew what we had to do. Advanced American technology, and dominant American military and economic power, were normally relevant to the task and could be deployed effectively. We sought, but were rarely dependent upon, the support of allies.

How has the international agenda of the United States changed? A new list of issues and problems has replaced the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War. These include:

• The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
• Trade and investment (American access to foreign markets and sources of raw materials)
• Enforcement of trading rules (intellectual property rights, dumping, non-tariff barriers)
• Terrorism
• International crime, especially traffic in drugs
• Regional conflicts, often ethnic or religious, causing refugee displacements and, frequently, appalling bloodshed
• World environment (population growth, global warming, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources)
• Maintenance of international financial and economic stability
• Democracy and human rights, including the role of women and minorities
• Regulating hundreds of international activities in the age of globalization (telecommunications frequencies, air traffic control, food and drug standards, health, immigration, taxation, etc.)

Such questions seem rather more complex than the deployment of American economic strength and defense capability to block Soviet expansion. The new agenda of problems cannot be solved unilaterally by one nation, even the world’s only superpower. They require communication with other peoples, building coalitions of concerned governments, working together with others to address issues which ignore national borders. In short, they demand diplomacy.

Because the United States is the only global power, it must engage and lead. Other governments tend to wait for the superpower. For over two years we stood back and urged the Europeans to come to grips with the deteriorating situation in former Yugoslavia. They could not do so, and progress was made only when the United States finally convened the parties to a tough negotiation in Dayton. A forceful American lead was prerequisite to addressing financial crises in Mexico in 1995 and in Brazil in 1998. This does not suggest that the United States can always succeed in persuading others to follow, but without clear American involvement not much is likely to happen. In Madeleine Albright’s words, the United States has become “the indispensable nation.”

A global power should be represented in every world capital, if only by an embassy of two or three people in the smallest countries. There is no telling when a vote in the UN may prove crucial, where key minerals may unexpectedly be uncovered, where terrorists may find a haven, when access to a particular airfield may be essential, when an American tourist or an American company may desperately need help. The cost of such representation is minimal. But, at the end of the twentieth century, for lack of resources, the Department of State is closing United States embassies.

Some argue that, in a global economy with modern telecommunications, with the internet, e-mail, and CNN, we no longer need embassies. This is quite wrong. True, the president or the secretary of state can telephone any foreign leader directly. But he or she badly needs the advice of trained Americans on the ground, experts who speak the language, understand the history and culture, know foreign leaders personally and can explain their values and the political pressures they are under, can suggest which arguments — or what public statements — will be effective.

In curtailing resources devoted to foreign relations, the Administration and the Congress are reflecting a public sentiment that since the Cold War is over the United States can save money on defense and foreign affairs. The president knows better. He should be educating the American public and the Congress about where national interest lies, not adapting to public opinion polls.

Actually, in national budget terms, economizing on the conduct of relations with other countries saves little money anyway. International affairs, including foreign aid, the State Department and Foreign Service, embassies abroad, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, public diplomacy and the Voice of America, payments to international organizations, all together represent approximately 1.1 percent of the federal budget. We spend 0.15 percent (3/20 of 1 percent) of our Gross National Product on development assistance. We are in last place, number twenty-one out of twenty-one, among the leading industrial nations by that measure. Austria, Italy, Britain, even Portugal spend twice what we do relative to their GNP, Canada three times, France four times, and Sweden six times.² And the United States, which has benefited more than any other power from the United Nations, is by a wide margin the farthest in arrears in payment of its dues. A demeaning picture.

In the year 2000, Americans live in a world so interdependent that the notion of isolationism as historically defined seems incongruous. International issues have become more varied and more ambiguous, demanding the steady involvement of the only global power. Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, epidemic disease, regional confrontations, environmental destabilization, all remain dangerous, but the truly existential threat of the Cold War is past. In these circumstances, the United States, lacking strong presidential commitment, appears to engage intermittently in foreign policy. Americans have, in a sense, withdrawn into their own prosperity. Distracted, they have allowed their government representatives to deny adequate resources to the conduct of American relations with other governments and peoples.

In late 1998, following a desperate public appeal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the administration and the Congress began to reverse the exaggerated reductions they had made since 1991 in the national defense budget. A similar correction for the relatively deeper cuts in support of diplomacy does not seem on the horizon.

PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE international scene fifty years into the future are of dubious value given the acceleration of change and technological innovation in our times. The best we can manage are some educated guesses. Of interest for this essay is whether the United States is likely still to be the world’s dominant power, how international issues may evolve, and how Americans will relate to and communicate with other peoples.

Although what has been called “the American century” is now behind us, there is reason to believe that the United States will still be a superpower in 2050, but not the only one. Europe, and probably China — assuming transition to an acceptable form of democracy can be achieved without protracted disruption — will have attained comparable status. India, by then with much the world’s largest population, will be a significant factor. However, national governments, including the “superpowers,” will have less capacity to determine events in an environment altered by the march of globalization, and much will hinge upon what proportion of mankind is not yet a part of that global society.

A discussion of trends apparent at the end of the twentieth century may suggest some directions of the future:

• The United States is not only the largest economy at present, it is the most dynamic and most productive, the clear leader in defense technology as well as information/communication technology (the dominant sector in the age of globalization); the United States is well situated to maintain its strong position.
• Population projections³ for the year 2050 place the United States at 394 million, the European Union (current members only) at 291 million, China at 1,322 million and India at 1,707 million. Japan is expected to decline to 101 million and Russia to 122 million, probably not levels from which either could project influence globally.
• Building a united Europe has proved a gradual process (the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957), hindered by strong nationalist sentiment and a somewhat confusing overlap with NATO. It has thus far included little coalescence in foreign policy, but the process goes forward. The advent of a common currency in 1999 should provide a major and, within a few years, probably a decisive stimulus to political unity.
• As stressed earlier in this paper, much of the new international agenda will not respond to military or economic power, but only to communication, persuasion, and shared commitment among nations. Now, however, when the United States, as the lone superpower, exerts its influence for a cause it believes to be in the common interest, it may be criticized for arrogance and resisted for behaving like a hegemon.
• Thus, it is becoming more difficult for the United States to shape events (even when it does engage fully); smaller powers or entities can threaten the global power with terrorism or by developing weapons of mass destruction, or can frustrate it by refusing to cooperate (Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Indian and Pakistani nuclear capability, the Arab/Israeli peace process, wars in Central Africa, narcotics production and trade, global warming); terrorism is a pointed example — at the end of 1998 the United States, confounded by serial bomb threats, felt constrained with increasing frequency to close various overseas embassies temporarily.
• Professor Francis Fukuyama, formerly a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, wrote⁴ nine years ago that the great ideological debates which had marked mankind were at an end as the entire world was moving toward liberal democracy. Fukuyama may have been premature (as well as melodramatic) but he had the direction right. At the close of the twentieth century, there are major holdouts — the Islamic countries generally, China, some other parts of Asia, and most of Africa — but the weight of history does seem clearly on the side of democracy and the open market economy.
• Globalization — the term no longer requires quotation marks — and the headway of technology will vastly change the world in the first half of the twenty-first century: the routine operation of large corporations across borders and continents, the increasingly interdependent global financial system, personal (and portable) telecommunication capability, the expansion of the internet and of transnational communication links among individuals and groups with common interests, the growth of multinational non-governmental organizations pursuing defined political, social, or economic objectives, more rapid and cheaper transportation, the increasing international mobility of labor as well as capital, perhaps also the dissemination of English as the world language. This evolution will make it more and more difficult to sustain authoritarian regimes insulated from the relatively open world system; globalization will also challenge and almost certainly diminish the authority of governments and could reduce the likelihood of war between developed nations.
• The gap between rich and poor countries is widening and the poor countries lag behind in sharing the benefits of the global economy; despite the scourge of AIDS in Africa, the population of the third world continues to expand rapidly while that of the industrialized world contracts;⁵ extreme poverty and overcrowding will inevitably generate suffering, instability and conflict; the resulting demand for humanitarian aid and peacekeeping deployments will be costly: this underlines the myopia of America’s niggardliness toward development assistance and aid for family planning.
• Outer space, and medical/biological technology are outside the scope of this paper. However, genetic engineering in particular, and the cloning of human beings (which appears to be imminent), could have vast and unpredictable consequences for international relations, as it will for human society altogether.
• A final and daunting trend must be cited. The United States — through its scientists, military and intelligence officers, and diplomats — will continue to lead a concerted international effort to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This operation has been surprisingly successful for fifty years, but it becomes more and more difficult. Most of the advances of modern technology are generally available. Sooner or later, probably well before the year 2050, terrorists, international criminals or rogue states—perhaps all three— will be in a position credibly to threaten the use of these weapons, and to use them in fact.

WELL, HERE WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

The unification of Europe has advanced to the point that the European Union, with a consolidated foreign policy, is now a global power. The wisdom of U.S. policy since the second World War of support for the integration of Europe (despite obvious economic competition) is confirmed, since the United States is now joined by another powerful democracy with a major stake in global stability. Heretofore, the United States has been frustrated by the disinclination of European governments, whether through NATO or the European Union, to share the burden beyond their immediate region. The United States is no longer the only “reluctant sheriff.”

China will have been able to attain superpower status only if successful in the transition to democracy. For that reason China, notwithstanding its profound cultural dissimilarity to the United States and the European Union, should prove more partner than adversary.

In 2050 the great bulk of international transactions are effected electronically between individuals, organizations, and companies without respect to governments. Financial and cross-currency operations are especially hard to track. The nationality of most giant global corporations is unclear, and individuals relocate frequently across national boundaries. Multinational non-governmental organizations pursuing a wide variety of environmental, social, economic, and political purposes are well-funded and powerful. In the industrialized world, but to far less extent in the developing world, there is interdependence approaching homogeneity among manufacturers, service industries, communications and transport companies, in education, medicine, and other professions.

Under these circumstances, the authority of national governments has been circumscribed. For example, the difficulty of tracing cross-border economic transactions and currency movements complicates the implementation of fiscal and monetary policy, to put it mildly. By 2050, most governmental regulation of economic activity has been supplanted by international agreements and organizations, in which it is not always easy to obtain the cooperation (often absolutely essential) of smaller countries. In fact, a new breed of sophisticated diplomatic experts must manage the heavy agenda of international discussion and negotiation, as well as staff international regulatory authorities.

But the greatest problems at mid-twenty-first century stem from the contrast between the developed (“globalized”) world and the less developed (essentially “unglobalized”) world, which comprises most of Africa and parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Central America. In the less developed countries, the paucity of skilled human resources and the still relatively inhospitable business climate restrict investment. Poverty and high population density breed malnutrition, instability, ethnic conflict and refugee movements. The migration of people from poor to rich societies, legal (because of the demand for labor) as well as illegal, has aggravated the social tensions from immigration already evident in the 1990’s in Western Europe and North America. Cultivation and trade in narcotics has increased, not abated, during the twenty-first century.

The earth’s environment has continued seriously to deteriorate from deforestation, the depletion of fisheries and the refusal of the developing world to share in the economic costs of reversing global warming. Human population pressure has sharply affected biodiversity; for example, the extinction of major species of African wildlife (reinforced by growing insecurity of travel) has caused the loss of important tourist revenue to East and Southern Africa.

Effective communication between the global powers and developing governments is crucial to addressing the sobering problems suggested above, and to accelerating economic development so as to facilitate wider participation in the global economy. American (and European) diplomats must as before be expert in cross-cultural communication but also trained in relevant technologies. Ambassadors must be leaders able to coordinate the contribution of non-governmental organizations, business corporations, and private citizens as well as governments in seeking common objectives.

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HUS, DIPLOMACY WILL CONTINUE to be central to achieving United States purposes in the twenty-first century. But the quality of American national leadership will be the most important single factor, as it was in 1950. Superb leadership at the middle of the twentieth century equipped the United States for a long, arduous, and ultimately victorious struggle in the Cold War.

With the turn of the century, American leadership in international matters is less certain. The United States is not fully exerting the role it could and should exert — in its own self-interest and in the world’s interest. If, in the two decades before us, the American political system can produce another generation of competent, decisive leaders, capable of convincing the American public and Congress that the United States must be fully engaged internationally and must allocate substantial resources to support the political and economic development of the poor countries, then world conditions at mid-twenty-first century need not look so bleak as has been outlined above. But that is a large “if.”

Unfortunately, even the finest leadership will lack the means to ensure that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons not fall into the hands of disaffected zealots.

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END NOTES 1. Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, Carla Hills, Max Kampelman, Ralph Larsen, Donald McHenry, Sam Nunn, Phil Odeen, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, Robert Strauss, Cyrus Vance and John Whitehead: “Equipped for the Future—Managing U.S. Foreign Affairs in the twenty-first Century”, The Henry L Stimson Center, Washington, October, 1998

2. “The International Affairs Budget”, United States Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, October 1995.

3. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce

4. “The End of History ?”, Francis Fukuyama, the quarterly journal National Interest , Summer 1989.

5. The U.S. Bureau of the Census projects that, between 1998 and 2050, the population of Africa will grow from 760 million to 2 billion while the continent of Europe declines from approximately 500 million to 400 million.

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