It is easy to get very discouraged when surveying the state of the world. Few Americans need to be reminded about the chaos in Iraq, Iran's ambitions as a regional and potentially nuclear power or the possibility of Sunni-Shiite conflict spreading throughout the Arabian Gulf.
But there's also the fact that Russia has been regressing politically, using its energy wealth to muscle Belarus and Western oil companies that invested in it.
Nationalism is resurgent in Northeast Asia, with younger generations of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans at each other's throats over wrongs committed more than half a century ago. This in turn blocks cooperation over the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons.
In our hemisphere, anti-US populists have been elected in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, and are busy centralising power and reversing the trend of the 1990s towards openness and economic integration.
Around the world, authoritarian regimes are learning repression from one another. What political scientist Samuel Huntington labelled the "third wave'' of democratisation began in the 1970s with Spain and Portugal, spread through Latin America and Asia, and culminated in the collapse of communism.
But this wave has clearly crested. Not wanting to see another democratic upsurge like Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, Russia, Egypt, Syria and Venezuela have all passed laws closing off international funding for pro-democracy groups.
Underlying these worrisome trends is a huge decline in the prestige of the American model, which since the Iraq war has come to be symbolised less by the Statue of Liberty than by the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib.
The world's evident instability has led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move the hands of its "Doomsday Clock'' to five minutes to midnight, two minutes closer to the figurative end of civilisation.
Even the fact that hundreds of millions of people are pulling themselves out of poverty lays the groundwork for global warming.
But before we get too discouraged with the state of the world at the beginning of 2007, we should stop to consider a broader context in which things look much brighter.
The single most notable but overlooked fact about today's world is that the global economy has been driving ahead full speed, raising living standards and closing the gap between the First and Third worlds.
The economies of the world's two most populous countries, India and China, have been growing in recent years at nearly 9 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. A decade after the 1997-98 financial crisis, East Asia as a whole has returned to its torrid pace of development.
But the rest of the world is growing steadily too. Latin America has been averaging 4 per cent to 5 per cent growth based on exports. Sub-Saharan Africa, after three decades of decline, has seen greater than 5 per cent annual growth in recent years and the Middle East is not far behind.
These trends in the developing world are increasingly driven by south-south trade, as India and China consume commodities and natural resources from Latin America and Africa. This has spawned world-class multinational companies from developing countries, such as Mittal (originally of India), Cemex (Mexico) and Embraer (Brazil).
Even Europe, despite the dislike of many of its intellectuals for an American-led globalisation, has seen rates of unemployment fall to levels without recent precedent as the European Union expands and integrates with the global economy.
What is even more striking than the fact of economic growth has been its robustness. Ah, many would say, but today's rosy economic picture masks huge vulnerabilities, particularly in the form of the twin American trade and budget deficits and the unsustainable buildup of US dollars in foreign central banks.
These deficits, and the global imbalances they represent, are indeed worrisome and unsustainable, but people misunderstand where they come from.
They do not arise primarily from American profligacy but rather from decisions taken by non-Americans to build up dollar reserves and thus ensure themselves against financial risks.
Economic growth by itself will not guarantee stability, any more than the period of globalisation before 1914 could prevent the outbreak of the First World War.
But there is good reason to think that we have consistently overestimated threats to stability since 9/11 and that it is our reaction to this overestimation that has created special dangers.
Real dangers
There are real dangers to being excessively pessimistic at this juncture. Growing numbers of people in the US and Israel believe that Iran represents an existential threat, that it will behave irrationally and therefore cannot be deterred - and that we consequently have no choice but to preempt.
It is this same logic - that our backs are against the wall - that led us to the Iraq debacle. But assuming a worst-case outcome is likely to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For all of its stumbles in the last few years, the US remains a rich and powerful country, with plenty of margin to absorb setbacks and make up for mistakes. There are real risks out there today, but it may help to take a deep breath and assess calmly where we stand.
Terrorists use the tools they do because they are weak and have no others. Americans need to remember that we are the 800-pound gorilla: We have choices, but we need to take care when we throw our weight around.
Francis Fukuyama is an American philosopher, political economist and author.
