Post-American World (Zakaria)

The Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria, 2008
W.W. Norton & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393334807

Summary
One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the "rise of the rest" is the great story of our time. "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria’s important new work on the era we are now entering.

Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.

The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.

How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1964
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Harvard (both USA)
• Awards—World Affairs Councils of America International
   Journalist Award
• Currently—lives in New York City

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and writes a weekly column on international affairs. His previous book was the New York Times bestseller The Future of Freedom. He lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

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Zakaria was born in India to a practicing Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a former government minister, deputy leader of the Congress party and a respected scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the Sunday editor of the Times of India. His brother Arshad is a former head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch and is currently the head of New Vernon Capital, the largest hedge fund investing in India. His two other siblings, a brother Mansoor and a sister Tasneem, are from his father's first marriage.

Fareed attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, India, where he was School Prefect and House Captain for Palmer, one of the four school Houses. After graduating from the Anglican school, Zakaria attended Yale University where he was a member of Berkeley college, Scroll and Key Society, President of the Yale Political Union, and a member of the Party of the Right. Zakaria received a B.A. from Yale and later graduated with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann.

Before his current position with Newsweek, Zakaria was managing editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs, a journal of international politics and economics.

Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard University. He has taught courses in international relations and political philosophy at Harvard, Columbia and Case Western universities. He has written for such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and the New Republic, and has also worked as a wine columnist for the webzine Slate. His 2002 essay for The New Yorker on America's global role has been widely quoted, as have several of his Newsweek cover-essays.

He is the author of the 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press), his Ph.D. thesis, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His book The Future of Freedom was published in the spring of 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller, as well as a bestseller in several other countries. It has been translated into more than eighteen languages. His most recent book, published in 2008, is The Post-American World, an examination of America's role in a world where it is still the political-military superpower but where economic, industrial, financial, and cultural power is being dispersed around the world.

In April 2005, Zakaria premiered as host of a new foreign affairs program on PBS, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.

During the December 28th, 2007 airing of his program Zakaria announced his retirement from Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria to pursue other broadcast opportunities. The new host is Daljit Dhaliwal.

Zakaria has won several awards for his Newsweek columns, including for his October 2001 cover story, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us". In 1999, he was named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" by Esquire. In 2005, he won the World Affairs Councils of America's International Journalist Award. In 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential graduates of Harvard University. He currently serves on the boards of Yale University, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, New America Foundation and Columbia University's International House. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. There is certainly plenty to bemoan—from the disappearing dollar to the subprime disaster, from rampant anti-Americanism to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will take years to win. Yet Zakaria's is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the "rise of the rest."
Josef Joffe - New York Times Book Review

Many of this volume's more acute arguments echo those that have been made by other analysts and writers, most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on globalization, and Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on America's growing isolation in an increasingly adversarial world. But Mr. Zakaria uses his wide-ranging fluency in economics, foreign policy and cultural politics to give the lay reader a lucid picture of a globalized world (and America's role in it) that is changing at light speed, even as he provides a host of historical analogies to examine the possible fallout of these changes.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but "the rise of everyone else," readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as Newsweekeditor and popular pundit Zakaria (The Future of Freedom) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading. We are living in a peaceful era, he maintains; world violence peaked around 1990 and has plummeted to a record low. Burgeoning prosperity has spread to the developing world, raising standards of living in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Twenty years ago China discarded Soviet economics but not its politics, leading to a wildly effective, top-down, scorched-earth boom. Its political antithesis, India, also prospers while remaining a chaotic, inefficient democracy, as Indian elected officials are (generally) loathe to use the brutally efficient tactics that are the staple of Chinese governance. Paradoxically, India's greatest asset is its relative stability in the region; its officials take an unruly population for granted, while dissent produces paranoia in Chinese leaders. Zakaria predicts that despite its record of recent blunders at home and abroad, America will stay strong, buoyed by a stellar educational system and the influx of young immigrants, who give the U.S. a more youthful demographic than Europe and much of Asia whose workers support an increasing population of unproductive elderly. A lucid, thought-provoking appraisal of world affairs, this book will engage readers on both sides of the political spectrum.
Publishers Weekly

According to Newsweek International editor Zakaria, the weakened global economic and political position of the United States results not from the waning of its own powers but from the rapid rise of many other global players. The optimistic tone of his previous book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, permeates this work. After 500 years of world dominance and following the decline of great states in other parts of the world, the Western powers are seeing countries such as China and India emerge as new and formidable rivals. Zakaria is sharply critical of the current U.S. presidential administration, citing its dysfunctional political stalemate and foreign and military policies that hinder adaptation to the current realities. He argues that it is incumbent upon the Western powers to adapt if they want to thrive instead of trying to reverse these realities, and he remains optimistic that they can change, as they have historically shown themselves able to do so. Zakaria's arguments are accessible to general readers, and his supporting data are not overwhelming to digest. Most libraries will want this.
Library Journal

Pity the poor think-tanked neocons: Just a moment ago, the talk was of empire and the new world order, and now, it seems, America's day in the sun is about to grow cold. Newsweek International editor Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, 2003, etc.), born in India and a longtime resident of New York, seems unconcerned that his adopted country is sailing down the tubes: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else." He enumerates: Macao takes in more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, the biggest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore, Bollywood has surpassed Hollywood. Even as the global population grows, the number of those living in extreme poverty is falling, at least in three-quarters of the world's nations. Even after 9/11, the author notes, the world economy "grew at its fastest rate in nearly four decades." Inflation exceeds 15 percent only in a dozen-odd failed states such as Burma and Zimbabwe, and fewer and fewer people are dying in wars or spasms of political violence than ever. That all should be good news to globalists, and it's comforting to know, as Zakaria helpfully points out, that Iran spends less than a penny for every dollar we spend on the military. Yet the United States has dawdled, economically speaking, as China, India and other nations have skyrocketed. It helps, Indians note, that the Chinese government, the commander of that nation's command economy, hasn't really had to respond to public opinion, though even that is changing. The good news? By Zakaria's account, America's strength will lie in freedom and diversity—and the post-American era may not last all that long, since America's population is growing, and growing younger, while the demographics of Asia and Europe are largely pointing to older populations and, in time, fewer workers. A sharp, well-written work of political economy.
Kirkus Reviews

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