The world is shrinking; this becomes more obvious every day, in a time when the United Arab Emirates offers to buy American ports and when Southeast Asia boasts the fiercest competition in the world economy.

The Bush administration stresses the need for adaptation. A recent proposal from the administration plans to spend $117 million on a national language initiative next year, teaching Arabic, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Russian.

The main point the president is trying to stress is national security; it is difficult to find and keep Arabic-speaking officials to interpret the communications in the “War on Terror” when Arabic is not widely taught in our schools.

Bush may be trying to sell this idea under the same buzzwords with which he sold the “War on Terror” or the Iraq war; however, this plan may actually be one of the brightest ideas of this administration.

China currently holds one-fifth of the world’s population, according to cia.gov, and India is a close second. These nations contain more than 1 billion people each — more than three times the population of the U.S. — creating a competitive market for cheap labor, which is why many of our jobs go overseas and many of our imports come from China.

This trend will probably increase, as Hong Kong integrates further within the mainland Chinese economy.

In the United Arab Emirates, the key words are tourism and trade. The annual Dubai Shopping Festival, this year from June 21 to Sept. 1, brought 3.4 million tourists to Dubai hotels in 2000. That may seem insignificant to Americans, but annually, this festival brings more tourists to Dubai than the population of the entire United Arab Emirates. The high amount of tourist activity here stimulates one of the most successful economies of the “third world,” giving rise to a variety of IT and financial companies, as well as a thriving global trade hub.

Both China and the UAE represent excellent global trade opportunities to come. As globalization paves a lucrative path around the world, the day may come when America no longer represents a good trade risk.

Some say this day is coming soon; these critics note that the U.S. imports (consumes) twice as much as it exports (produces), a negative trade balance that worsens annually.

In a sense, this is a situation similar to not paying your credit card bill. It’s only a matter of time before the collection notices arrive.

There is a way to combat this: The United States could improve its trade balance. However, this is unlikely to happen; businesses seek cheap labor, laborers seek high-paying jobs, and these two sides clash in ideology.

That’s why it’s more profitable to go overseas and pay a Chinese worker a fraction of what an American might make.

The United Arab Emirates and China are expected to be very exciting places to do business in the future; learning Chinese or Arabic now could make a huge difference in whether Americans will continue to survive in the global economy.