And the Rest Also Rise The Post-American World
Zakaria, Fareed
booKs In RevIew Whether President Bush realized it or not, when he appointed Paul “Jerry” Bremer to be Iraq’s viceroy in May 2003, he committed to “occupation in the name of liberation.”...
...The natives have gotten good at capitalism...
...No problem, they can be cleaned out within months...
...He has seen the future, it works, and much of it is not in the USA: Taipei has the world’s tallest building, Mexico the richest man, China the largest publicly traded corporation, Europe is building the biggest passenger plane, and London is becoming the leading financial center...
...America remains the default power, as one German commentator recently put it...
...Besides that, China is the world’s worst polluter, regional differences are widening, and socioeconomic inequality is rising to dangerous levels, as is corruption among high Chinese officials...
...Despite dismal phrases like “How did America blow it...
...Then something called history happened to them...
...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 73...
...First we fretted over being behind the Soviets in space after they put up Sputnik, then the oil shocks of the early 1970s convinced us Saudi Arabia and Europe were the future, and in the 1980s we were going to be eaten alive by the Japanese...
...It was the talk of Davos at this year’s World Economic Forum...
...But wait, he says, this is really good news, “one of the most thrilling stories in history...
...not only dictated the rules of the game, it was the game...
...Meanwhile, the spectacle of American troops driving around and dying in the replenished minefield that much of Iraq had become told America’s enemies that American military power is not to be feared...
...All this makes Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World something of a latecomer to declinology...
...And a tolerant Confucianism frees the authorities from having to worry about petty ethical problems created by Christian morality...
...By 1945 the Europeans were on their knees, kaput as international powers, thanks to one last irrationalorgy oftribal bloodlust...
...But Rumsfeld no more than Feith broke with the Bush team’s folkways by forcing the president to decide what he really meant by his so-called decisions, if necessary by resigning...
...Prosperity, open markets, and democracy are spreading, we live in a relatively peaceful era by historical standards, al Qaeda and rogue states are fading into blips on the radar screen...
...Even in France, where being proAmerica is hardly fashionable, I often meet French parents who speak with pride of sending their children to college in the U.S., where they frequently stay to work...
...Thus has the world’s largest country also become its largest manufacturer, second-largest consumer, biggest saver, and, probably, second-largest military spender...
...Stop cowering in fear,” he exhorts, and aim at being the world’s chairProsperity, open markets, and democracy are spreading, we live in a relatively peaceful era by historical standards, al Qaeda and rogue states are fading into blips on the radar screen...
...Know anybody sending their kids to Beijing U...
...When he rattles off some of the results of that rise, they are none the less impressive for being familiar: exporting as much in a single day as it did in all of 1978, it makes two-thirds of the world’s photocopiers, microwave ovens, and shoes, with the average Chinese personal income rising 700 percent in the last 30 years...
...norton, 292 pages, $25.95) Reviewedby Joseph a. Harriss booKs In RevIew In his stimulating new book, Zakaria works hard at finding a balance between dire views of declining American influence and hopeful scenarios for the future...
...That impression was reinforced when the Cold War ended, creating an anomalous unipolar world: suddenly the U.S...
...he wondered...
...The most richly endowed investment fund is in the United Arab Emirates, the biggest shopping mall in Beijing, the largest movie industry in India, and, in case you were wondering, the largest Ferris wheel in Singapore...
...and moral values threatened our collective soul...
...As a book purportedly about the rise of the rest, the scant attention paid to powerful new players like Brazil and Russia is its major flaw...
...government’s efforts to give the Sunni minority more power than their fellow Iraqis thought wise fed the violence...
...A foreign multinational wants an attractive, well-located production site that inconveniently is already occupied by buildings and people...
...Feith describes a corrupt bureaucratic culture...
...More recently, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams gave us a stiff dose of reality with its warning that international competition and conflict were alive and well...
...The occupation legitimized the insurgency, and the U.S...
...In India some 836 million live on less than 50 cents a day, while Indian democracy, Zakaria says diplomatically, is problematic...
...Most of the industrialized world has better cell phone service than the U.S., and computer connectivity is faster and cheaper, with America rating about 16th in broadband penetration per capita...
...Some said it was a permanent new world order, the end of history...
...he wonders rhetorically, before showing us that it already is...
...These and others of Rumsfeld’s writings show him to be intellectually far above other top officials...
...The Indian-born, American-educated editor of Newsweek’s international edition previously argued provocatively in his best-selling The Future of Freedom that too much democracy too soon can actually be a danger to individual liberty, lending itself to thuggish abuse...
...The war pushed the young American nation, with its vast, raw potential and rambunctious energy, onto the world scene in 1918, even though Americans, as Teddy Roosevelt lamented, had no “stomach for empire...
...Still, for all their new dynamism the rest are not 10 feet tall...
...By staying in it too long he became part of the problem he describes...
...He defines this post-American world as one shaped by many people in many places, multipolarity with a vengeance...
...Z Z akaria concentrates on China and India as the world’s current success stories...
...But with hegemony finished, consultation, cooperation, and compromise with the rest is the way to go as we dodder off to retirement...
...the Pew Global Attitudes Project found last spring that majorities in Western Europe believe either that China will replace America as the leading superpower or already has...
...Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History showed the rise and fall of civilizations and the nations that produced them to be the inevitable norm...
...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 71 The Post-american World By Fareed Zakaria (w.w...
...The elder statesman, in effect...
...America’s advantage in higher education is overwhelming and its demographics are better than Europe’s, thanks to immigration and a high birth rate (the latter of which, I seem to recall, used to be associated with impoverished Third World lands...
...to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism, from Yankee Go Home riots during presidential visits abroad to a bored, consumption-drugged shrug...
...It began with the rise of the Renaissance Western world, followed in the late 19th century by an industrialized U.S...
...We have trained their best and brightest in our universities...
...The “rise of the rest,” in his favorite phrase, is the third big power shift of the last 500 years...
...Today he observes a move away from American dominance in every dimension—industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural—except military power...
...Time and again, America’s resiliency and resourcefulness made such notions look silly...
...And it worked,” he writes with perhaps slightly forced enthusiasm...
...And get used to a second-best Ferris wheel...
...applies always and everywhere, no exceptions...
...To put things in perspective, it’s worth recalling that slightly over 100 years ago a bold Canadian prime minister confidently declared that while the 19th century was America’s, the 20th would surely belong to Canada (sic...
...Not a bad role, though far from a Roman imperium...
...Inspired by ominous events like the tanking dollar and the credit crisis, the storyline of America’s decline has become today’s new orthodoxy, with the likes of Thomas Friedman opining that “We are not who we think we are...
...But late-comers often have an advantage, and his is that he can build on the others and do some summing up...
...Until further notice it’s still the last, best hope of mankind...
...It also found that 31 percent of Americans think the same thing...
...Gloomy predictions aside, the hard fact is that today we continue to inspire and fascinate with our openness, opportunity, flexibility, and dynamism...
...And the Rest Also Rise T T he european powers that for centuries had created and defined Western civilization were bled white at the end of the First World War...
...Patrick Buchanan told us in The Death of the West that the breakdown of religious, cultural...
...T T his is a useful survey of shifting global balances, wide-ranging, cosmopolitan, and written in readable journalistic prose...
...Zakaria points out uncritically that two of China’s “advantages” today are autocratic central planning (“not having to respond to the public has often helped Beijing carry out its strategy”), and the Chinese not believing in God...
...One aspect of that new element, for better or worse, is that the world is moving from anger toward the U.S...
...Zakaria manages to conclude on a positive note...
...And the newly confident and assertive rest won’t be talked down to any more: Chinese officials publicly lecture Washington on its “warped conception” of market regulation that created the subprime crisis and denounce its “hos 72 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 booKs In RevIew tility” and “discriminatory attitude” on allowing foreign investments...
...Who else will take care of global business...
...Yet for him Ronald Reagan’s unflagging optimism helped maintain the atmosphere of national possibility and promise that had attracted and held so many other new arrivals...
...Globalized capitalism is hugely successful and millions are escaping poverty...
...America’s per capita GDP remains 25 times that of China, and of the 35 largest companies on the Shanghai stock exchange, 34 are either wholly or partly owned by the government (a situation, Zakaria explains with unintentionally comic understatement, “often at odds with openness, honesty, and efficiency...
...Development on such a scale adds “a wholly new element to the international system...
...Suddenly it seemed that this was indeed the American century...
...This book includes, among other interesting things, some memos written by Donald Rumsfeld that describe the deadly possibility that occupying Iraq would lead to more or less what happened...
...Unemployment was at its highest since 1945, interest rates were at 15 percent, and Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis had battered national self-confidence...
...Since America emerged victorious from the Second World War, Nervous Nellies have often worried about losing the number-one spot...
...But while India—handicapped by messy democracy— will have the third-largest economy by 2040, China’s astonishing rise is already here, having compressed 200 years of Western industrial development into 30 and still growing faster than any major economy in recorded history...
...man of the board guiding a group of independent directors...
...becoming the most powerful nation “since imperial Rome” (one of several comparisons to the Roman imperium that some will find infelicitous...
...Will history happen to the United States as well...
...Besides ancient Rome, the nearest analogy to today’s America that Zakaria can think of—again, an unappealing one—is the British Empire in its heyday, when the Brits blithely assumed they would stay on top indefinitely...
...He fondly recalls arriving from India in 1982 as an 18-year-old and plunging into an America riddled with doubt...
...And this success is all America’s doing, because for the last 60 years we have been urging the world to open up to free markets and develop new industries and technologies...
...booKs In RevIew Whether President Bush realized it or not, when he appointed Paul “Jerry” Bremer to be Iraq’s viceroy in May 2003, he committed to “occupation in the name of liberation...
...Today dominance by an “enfeebled” America may be over, he says, but cheer up, the world is increasingly going our way...
...Declinism went into high gear two decades ago with Paul Kennedy’s much-discussed The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which developed the concept of relative politico-economic decline due to constantly shifting patterns of wealth, innovation, and military strength, with its obvious implications for the erosion of America’s dominance...
...Oswald Spengler’s elegiac, monumental The Decline of the West, appropriately published in 1918, argued that the creative period of our culture was over and it was downhill from there...
...But that vision of history and our place in it contradicted what philosophers and historians had long been telling us: sic transit gloria mundi Joseph a. Harriss is an American writer in Paris whose latest book is About France (iUniverse...
...Lest he be accused of being down on his adopted country, he declares on page one that it’s all just relative anyway: “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else...
...Indeed: nearly one-fifth of the members of parliament have been accused of crimes including embezzlement, rape, and murder...
...But the questions it raises deserve to frame the important foreign policy debate in this election about America’s place—and its realistic, achievable objectives—in the multipolar world aborning...
...He points out that since America emerged victorious from the Second World War, Nervous Nellies have often worried about losing the numberone spot...
...Goldman Sachs issued its so-called BRIC report showing that Brazil, Russia, India, and China are coming on strong...
...We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 7
