Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

WASHINGTON, CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October, 2011  

Numerous irrelevancies can be advanced on behalf of rival cities. Paris is more beautiful, London more cosmopolitan, Beijing more commercial. But only Washington has a serious claim to be the capital of the whole wide world. 

It certainly looks the part. If you were going to invent a global capital from scratch, you might well endow it with a broad mall, a domed capitol, neoclassical temples, a reflecting pool, a towering central obelisk. But such a city would be a Disneyland without the thing Washington still has in unrivalled abundance: sheer, raw, world-bestriding power. 

China snaps at America’s heels, and yet it is the grey men in the grey Treasury Building here who still run the world’s biggest economy. Just round the corner is the Federal Reserve, running the world’s reserve currency. On the far side of the fast-flowing Potomac sprawls the Pentagon, still the world’s biggest office building: its 25,000 denizens run a defence budget as big as the rest of the world’s added together. And from the white mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a modest home compared with the Elysée or Buckingham Palace, the president can still depose potentates in Mesopotamia and bump off jihadists in Waziristan. 

The residents of Washington are undeceived by its architectural grandiosity. Hailing from greater American cities, they pine for the electricity of New York or the karma of San Francisco. For all its monuments and avenues Washington can feel provincial, even languid. But every so often you look up from your iced coffee to catch a flight of choppers scudding over the rooftops and remember: for good or ill, here is the nearest facsimile our age offers to the might of ancient Rome. 

Peter David is The Economist's Washington bureau chief and former foreign editor.

If you don't agree that Washington is the capital of the world, you're in good company. John Parker argues that London wears the crown.

But which city do you think is the capital of the world in 2011? Have your say by voting in our poll.