Thank you, Mr. Lemire. I was glad you asked that question, because I'm obviously a lot older than you are, so I have memories going back to the Cold War.
I'm bringing that up because I'm in this debate group with some friends of mine, and academia out in the business world is debating and saying that the U.S. dollar is in decline as the foreign reserve currency, yet when you look back over the last 100 years, right up to today, I don't see big changes in our allies and our enemies. There was a bloc called the Warsaw Pact, or the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, that worked under its own currency, which was ruble-dominated. They were the “enemies”. There is a bloc emerging today. China is pushing this BRIC-issued currency.
To answer your question, I went and looked up World Bank data. It's very easy to access. I looked up the allies, the OECD countries that are really under the U.S. partnership or umbrella. The GDP of these countries—I'm talking about the OECD, so it's 35 or 36 countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Canada—is about two-thirds, or $65 trillion, of the world GDP of $100 trillion.
The developed countries—and I'm not being ethnocentric, because I've taught in many developing countries—the high-income countries, to use the World Bank classification, are two-thirds of the world. They are growing much more quickly. As The Economist cover story showed just last week, the United States is growing and outperforming everybody. It seems to me that the coalition of partners is very stable, all the way from 1917 and the Russian revolution to today. It's just that China, if you will, has taken the place of the Soviet Union. You have two very clear blocs emerging again.
I don't disagree with Mr. Bruce. I'm not suggesting we should stop dealing with China. I'm saying we can deal with China, to put it simplistically and crudely, with low-technology products, shipping them fish, wheat or barley. I understand the believable and serious concern with much more sophisticated products, for which there are issues of technology that we don't want to transfer.
I think we can look at the world through that prism of two blocs. There's the OECD bloc, the high-income bloc or the U.S.-led bloc—whatever word we want. There's another bloc led by China, but it's much smaller. It's only a third of the world's GDP. By the way, the lion's share of that is China.
If you look at it through that lens, I think you can look at the national security.... I know who the allies of Canada are. They are next door. They are the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, the U.K. and so forth. I don't worry about that, because I have a clear idea.
I'm saying this as somebody who has taught in China for 25 years, year after year. I love going there. There are wonderful people at the student level, but at the same time, it's a very different bloc with very different values and a very different legal system. We have a good sense of who the two camps or the two blocs are and what countries are in each one.