The Post-American World

I arrived in the city pictured on the cover of this book -- Hong Kong -- two years after Zakaria came to the United States. Watching Asia change, year after year -- I spoke at several churches in Hong Kong this summer, and the skyscrapers of Central spread out before the window of my hotel room are now the most impressive on earth -- Zakaria puts into words, and hard statistics, realities that I have been pondering for many years now. In 1984, I remember watching people in a small town outside Hong Kong snapping together little pieces of plastic to make Christmas toys. It's hard to imagine seeing that sort of poverty there today. Education, hard work, the export of technology, and free enterprise have brought increasing prosperity to countries around the world, as Zakaria shows. He does a wonderful job of melding stats, telling facts, quotes from statesmen, to present a case for a reality that Americans need to get used to: there will be no "second American century." The United States will be one of several great powers within a few short years. I don't much agree with Zakaria's politics. He's a moderate democrat, I'm a conservative Republican. To me, the greatest American blunder is not anything George Bush did overseas, but the suicidal binge spending the Bush, and especially Obama, administrations have engaged in. But nothing we can do could have stopped the laws of mathematics anyway, and as free trade and the spread of techonology evens out per capita production, "we must decrease (relatively) and they must increase." I think if anything, Zakaria underestimates the extent of that change. Within a few years, China will be the world's richest superpower in GDP. (As I predicted 25 years ago.) Our vast borrowing from the Chinese has probably excelerated the transition. With 4-5 times our population, in a generation we will be roughly to China what the UK is to us, and India will surpass the US as well. Zakaria is right to look at the last time such a transition occurred, from the UK, to put this in context, but wrong in some of the conclusions he draws. It is unreasonable to blame the moralizing of British evangelicals for weakening British power, for example. Was Britain weaker because it banned the slave trade and began to educate Indians instead of merely exploit them? Such policies were largely responsible for the "soft power" Zakaria admires, and did not cause Britain's relative decline. What Zakaria says on page 109 about East Asian religious beliefs is also misleading, IMO. (See David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing for a more reasonable discussion, or my True Son of Heaven.) Strangely, Zakaria expresses surprise that 72% of Chinese deny that one must believe in God to be moral. Doesn't he know that young Chinese have been educated by communists, who are atheists, for the past 60 years? What's remarkable is that it's only 72 % -- the real story is the renewel of and spread of religion in China, including Chris

This is the best book on the subject since The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Zakaria's analysis is balanced and insightful unlike After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism). Zakaria benchmarks the U.S. outlook against England in the 19th century. England faded because of economic exhaustion as it became nearly bankrupt because of WWI when its debt reached 136% of GDP and interest payments amounted to 50% of its Budget. By 1945, the U.S. GDP was 10 times England. But, England extended its influence by facilitating the rise of the U.S. The U.S. situation is different because it is a leading economy. Since the 1880s, it has been the largest economy steadily accounting for 25% of World GDP. Over the past 25 years, U.S. GDP growth has averaged 3% vs only 2% for Western Europe. While defense spending broke England's back, it accounts for only 4.1% of U.S. GDP. The U.S. Current Account Deficit (CAD) at 7% of GDP is not a concern when coupled with low unemployment, high productivity, and a world savings glut. He mentions the Smiley curve where the U.S. leads in product innovation (the smile left side) and in branding (the smile right side) where profits are generated. China leads in low cost manufacturing (the bottom of the Smiley curve) where profits are slim. Long term forecasts rank the U.S. GDP per capita way ahead of others. The U.S. is a technology leader dominating nanotech, and biotech. It invests 2.6% of GDP in higher education vs only 1.2% for Europe and Japan. In any discipline, U.S. universities routinely account for 7 of the top 10 worldwide spots. Demography is another U.S strength. Europe is aging rapidly. This will increase its fiscal stress, shrink labor force, and slow economic growth. Many Asian countries are in the same situation. By 2010, Japan will have 3 million fewer workers than it did in 2005. But, the U.S. workforce will keep growing because it readily assimilates immigrants. The `Rise of the Rest' will mainly grab market share from Japan and Europe and not the U.S. The U.S. has many challenges. Globalization has increased international competition. The U.S. has now one of the highest corporate tax rates because everyone lowered theirs. Due to a more efficient regulatory infrastructure London has bypassed NY as the top financial center. Jobs are going to places with well-trained workers with efficient benefit costs. U.S business can save $6,000 in health care costs per worker by moving operations to Canada. The "rise of the rest" means mainly the rise of China and India. He dedicates chapter 4 to China (`The Challenger') and chapter 5 to India (`The Ally'). Those two economies are different. One is a top down government organized one (China). The other is a bottom up private sector driven one (India). The Chinese model creates superior infrastructure. India's model makes for superior capital a

Fareed Zakaria writes that three great global power shifts have occurred in the last 500 years: the first was the rise of the West with its advances in science, technology, and commerce; the second was the rise of the US, to superpower status after World War II and to hyperpower status after the Cold War; and the third - the one we are currently experiencing - is the "rise of the rest." The global dominance that the US has enjoyed is rapidly coming to an end, not because of its own missteps - there were many - but because of the extraordinary economic growth in countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil. Except for a few pockets of poverty, globalization has been largely successful. The Post-American World points to the need for America to adopt new ways of doing business with the world, one that is based on "consultation, cooperation, and even compromise" as opposed to go-it-alone unilateralism. American success in the 21st century will depend on how these newly ascendant powers will be integrated into existing institutions such as the G8, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. Even though some of these countries do not meet Western liberal democratic standards they should not be shut out as Robert Kagan suggested in The Return of History and the End of Dreams. Integrating autocracies such as China, Russia, and the Central Asian republics in the international liberal order will be one of the greatest challenges in international relations in the years ahead. After all, autocracies have been very successful, producing 7-10% annual growth rates. They produce great investment opportunities for foreigners. And their foreign policy of non-interference with the sovereignty of other countries has made them welcome almost everywhere. This purely pragmatic approach, although successful in economics, has many shortcomings in the political realm. Zakaria believes that although they have been successful and even popular, it is important for Western democracies to have solidarity to prevent further backsliding. Economic growth is only one of the components that keep autocracies in power, another is nationalism. One need only look at the popularity of Putin when he defies the West or China's reaction everytime they feel slighted by foreigners. Nationalism will rise as economic fortunes rise. Zakaria, who is always reasonable and optimistic in his views, believes that nations will be reasonable too. He believes that the newly ascendant powers will not be aggressive militarily if they are embedded in the current system. China, for example, does not need to invade neighboring countries when it can buy whatever it needs. For the time being this is working, but what happens "the rest" become much more powerful and resources become even more scarce? Will the the international order hold or will nationalist impulses rule the day? Zakaria is optimistic, but he still believes that the US will have an indispensible roll in keeping this system i

A lot of books have been appearing recently about the rise of China and India, the decline of the United States, and so forth. This is the one to read, and the one that will last. Zakaria's last book was about "The Future of Freedom," a study of liberalism and democracy. This new one--which is even better, I think--is about the shape of the emerging international system. It's called "The Post-American World," but a better title would have been the one he gives his first chapter, "The Rise of the Rest." That's because Zakaria's central thesis is that the world is changing, but the change is largely for the better and caused by the benign development of other power centers, not some collapse or decline of the United States. The biggest challenge for America, he argues, is not terrorism or nuclear proliferation or a rising China, but rather our own ability to adapt successfully to the new environment. He favors confidence and openness rather than insecurity and barriers, and makes a convincing case. The book has chapters on each of the major international players, and they're really well done: amazingly, he manages to paint a full portrait of, say, China or India that is intelligent, succinct, subtle, and comprehensive all at once. If you want to get a flavor of what the book has to offer, there's an article based on it in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, and there should be another one coming out in Newsweek too, apparently. The man might be a superachieving bigshot, but he sure can write--each page is lively and interesting. So forget the angry neocons, the wild-eyed optimists, the gloom-and-doom pessimists, and the glib amateurs who don't really know anything. Read this instead, and get insight into what's actually going in the world and what should be done about it. Plus, there's just a ton of fun little nuggets you'll be itching to drop in every conversation you have about anything related.

Mr. Zakaria has written a short primer (250+ pages of text) about where the world is today and the role he sees the United States playing in the future. His assessment, for the most part, is fair, balanced and nonpartisan. And though the title of his treatise--The Post-American World--sounds pessimistic, in reality Mr. Zakaria sees the glass half full. The principal weakness of the book is a product of its brevity: the author paints in broad strokes, providing a sweeping assessment of the dynamic changes that have unfolded on the world scene over the past twenty-five years. This invariably results in some over-generalizations and assessments that are not sufficiently nuanced. For example, in responding to concerns about China's growing power and influence, he quotes several Chinese officials who repeatedly reassure the listener that, notwithstanding its recent advances, China still lags behind the United States in so many areas; consequently, it poses no real threat to America or its neighbors. Instead of taking these sentiments at face value, Mr. Zakaria should remember, as Margaret Macmillan astutely noted in her recent book, "Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World," that the Chinese are the past masters at using self-effacement to lure their adversaries into a state of complacency. The greatest strengths of the book are explaining to the reader how much the world has changed over the past 25 years (did you know that China now exports more goods and services in a single day than it did in all of 1978?), while illuminating the course corrections the United States needs to make so that it can continue to influence the evolution of globalization. I was surprised to discover that the simple truths taught by Adam Smith have lifted more people above the poverty line in the last 25 years (400 million in China alone) than all the government assistance programs of all the countries in the world since the beginning of time. But I was dismayed to learn that the polices of free trade, liberal immigration, technological change and open government that are the source of this global revolution are no longer warmly received in the United States. Mr. Zakaria notes that in 2007 the Pew Global Attitudes Survey polled citizens in 47 countries for purposes of measuring the extent to which they have positive views about free trade and open markets. Guess where the U.S. came in? Dead last. Mr. Zakaria observes that in the five years the survey has been done, no country has seen as great a drop-off as the United States. It's as if, he says, that for the past sixty years we have extolled the virtues of free markets, immigration, technological change, competition, and democracy, and now that the rest of the world has finally decided to take our advice, "we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated." (p. 48). If you want to look in the mirror and see the warts and disappointments, along with the beauty and promise, of America, read t