A recent business trip to Ghana brought to light one of the campaign promises made by Donald Trump that all Americans should hope he fulfills: the need for improved national infrastructure.
For that journey, I followed Robert Frost's dictum to take the road less traveled. I caught an Emirates flight to Accra through Dubai for about the same price as a flight on a U.S.-based carrier. After landing in Seattle, I was bewildered by the three air trams I had to transit just to arrive at the aging international terminal. The Emirates gate buzzed with activity and enthusiasm radiating from the largely Asian, Middle Eastern and Indian throng of passengers waiting there to board a gleaming Boeing 777.
Landing in Dubai on a dusty, summer evening brought something into focus that captured my attention more than the Burj Khalifa or the fountains that caress it: a relatively new international airport surrounded by a young fleet of planes from air carriers not as well known to Americans, whose owners are betting on the 21st century as an age of economic promise. Ignorance of the nearly century-long effort by the emirs of the region to diversify their economies and invest in facilities that would facilitate that shift leaves us staring at the burgeoning skylines of Doha, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, when we should be taking a cue from their and our own history.
Following World War II, which ushered in the ensuing age of American ascent, metropolitan cities and the federal government poured a flush of dollars into new airports, roads and ambitious urban improvements. Their viability peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, the very time that economies, such as those in the United Arab Emirates, India and China, sensed the winds of change, which blew away from politics and economics entrenched in a waning Cold War world. It was at those moments, and not in the early 21st century, when the seeds of sustainable growth for the next century were planted — far away from New York, London and Paris. Even Accra, the terminus of my journey, buzzed with anticipation for the eminent inauguration of a new airline terminal that sits aside an aging facility built during the same developmental generation as many of those in the United States
These global juxtapositions should not come as a surprise to most Americans. Thomas Friedman brought them to light a decade ago in his elegantly written polemic — The World is Flat — meant to awaken English-reading audiences to the leveling effect that revolutions in information technology and infrastructure portend for a future day that has now arrived. In fact, the flat world he predicted suggests that those countries that build new roads, airports and railways will compete more robustly in a world no longer limited by distance, a reality even more true today with the increased range of new airplanes and faster trains.
The profits of legacy carriers cannot hide the fact that the center for global transit has now shifted even farther east. Likewise, in the long term, countries like Turkey, which now suffer at the expense of the latest presidential tweet, will make course corrections as their economies take flight by virtue of new airports (the world’s largest to come online in Istanbul in October), bridges and roads.
Indeed, it is now possible that the United States and Europe are slowly slipping toward "receding economy" status, in contrast to their emerging counterparts in Asia and the Middle East, not solely because of the leveling power of the information technology revolutions, but also because of missed opportunities to renew a transportation grid what was once the envy of the world — a generation or two in the past.