Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 191–196
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The Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria. New York: W.W. Norton/London: Allen Lane, 2008. $25.95/£20.00. 304 pp.
On 21 May 2008, the New York Times published a photograph of presidential hopeful Barack Obama striding across an airport runway in Bozeman, Montana, with his left index finger inside a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World. For those hoping that the new American president will help guide his country through a potentially turbulent transition in international politics, that’s a good thing, because this is among the most insightful books on our fast-changing world written in the past decade. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m proud to call Fareed Zakaria a friend. But I am far from alone in considering him one of the world’s most astute observers of global politics and America’s fast-evolving international role. The Post-American World has already earned its author a large audience inside and outside the United States.
Zakaria is hardly the first author to describe the ‘rise of the rest’, an emerging world order in which newly dynamic developing countries compete more successfully with the United States for power and influence in both international politics and the global marketplace. But his portrait of a world ‘defined and directed from many places and by many people’ is more incisively detailed than most. More importantly, its forecast is free of both the wishful thinking and the unjustified fear that often drive these kinds of arguments. From the very first sentence, Zakaria warns that ‘this is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else’. From there, he articulates both the challenges and the opportunities these changes will create for future US policymakers.
Some books, it must be said, age better than others. In this case, the global financial crisis, which took hold after The Post-American World arrived in bookstores, has only reinforced the book’s central thesis and accelerated the process it describes. Just in the past few weeks, China has begun talking up the possibility of a new reserve currency to replace the dollar and has insisted (quite reasonably) on greater voting rights for itself within the International Monetary Fund. The United States was unable during the recent G20 summit in London to persuade France and Germany to support coordinated efforts toward greater economic stimulus. Following North Korea’s latest rocket launch, Washington was able to win only a watered-down, face-saving compromise resolution from Russia and China in the UN Security Council. These are just the latest of dozens of recent tell-tale signs that the primary foreign-policy challenge facing Barack Obama and future US presidents will be in finding ways to do more with less – to achieve ambitious policy goals with less international clout.
Insights
Zakaria offers plenty of useful insights on the emerging powers already making a difference in international politics. In particular, he has created detailed and provocative portraits of both China and India, without forcing a stilted comparison. Both are Asian countries with large populations but, as Zakaria details, their...
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Ian Bremmer is President of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading global political risk advisory and consulting firm. He is author of The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall and, with co-author and colleague Preston Keat, of The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing (2009).
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