The Post-American World (Book Review)
Zakaria, Fareed. The Post-American World: Release 2.0 ; Updated and Expanded. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.Summery
Surprisingly, Fareed Zakaria's book 'The Post-American World' has nothing to say about a world without America, and it also has nothing to say about a world in which America is not the chief power. Rather, his book is an attempt to explain a future in which rival countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and China rise to become regional powers and fuse their own personalities and strengths into the economic and cultural world market. Zekaria calls this phenomenon the "rise of the rest." He believes there have been three major power shifts over the last three centuries: (1) a shift to Western Europe, (2) a shift to the United States, and (3) a current shift to the "rest." Zakaria plays down the media's crisis coverage of terrorism and other eye catching trends. He claims the current global economic system is more structurally sound then most people realize, and he suggests it's here to stay. From this assertion, he attempts to argue that the biggest historical shift in power and prosperity in history is going to be from the United States and Western Europe towards the BRIC countries. He points to various economic statistics from those markets to show that they are exploding and will soon wield world influence.
Zakaria summarizes the history of Western Civilization and argues that it's excelled the rest of the world since at least AD 1350. He claims the West's rise was stimulated by contact with the outside world, but he doesn't site any evidence for this assertion and never evaluates alternative possibilities (he simply assumes that outside contact creates growth). Zakaria foresees a future global cultural stew exemplified in the word and works of "Bollywood." He also suggests that world politics may diverge from the Western human rights based model. He cites China's foreign policy moves in Africa. African dictators are more likely to accept Chinese rather than Western investment because the Chinese do not ask them to modify their often egregious behavior so long as they adopt policies beneficial to China.
Zakaria evaluates the two biggest emerging global players: China and India. In two chapters, he dissects their advantages and disadvantages while attempting to predict their emerging relations with the United States and the rest of the world. His chapter on China, "The Challenger," portrays a country emerging more rapidly than any other. He documents the astounding rise of China after it abandoned a central planning economic model and adopted capitalistic reforms over the last thirty years. China is experiencing a rise in nationalism that threatens to make it more hostile towards American and Western objectives. Zakaria only briefly mentions the religious difference between China and the West. He touches on the difference between the West's linear view of time, and sense of destiny, and China's traditionally cyclical view and secular ambition. This worldview difference might prevent China from forming its own sense of purpose and meaning.
Zakaria's chapter on India is entitled "The Ally." He outlines India's many problems: huge numbers of impoverished people, decentralized government, extraordinary diversity, and the remnants of socialist central planning. However, India also has strengths: its massive population, its genuinely democratic form of government, and an emerging capitalist economy. He describes how India and the United States, despite a rocky past, are natural allies because they're economically compatible and share a messy decentralized political process. Zakaria acknowledges that India may never attain China's level of success, but it will still hold a prominent position in the "post-American world." India is a strong potential coalition partner for the United States.
Zakaria explores the source American power by paralleling it with Britain's rise and fall. According to Zakaria, America's power rests primarily in its education system. Its colleges and universities are the world's best, and it has weaponized them for brain drain. Zakaria claims East Asian teachers can often get their students to perform well on tests, but those students then study in America in order to learn how to think creatively. Zakaria sees numerous factors feeding into America's success, but he views America's political system as its greatest weakness. He points to the American people's inability to unite due to sensationalist media coverage and other factors, and he suggests that European states operate on a better working model.
Zakaria devotes the remainder of his book to what America can do to retain its power and position. He proscribes six things to preserve America's future: (1) Choose - America needs to decide its priorities and focus on them. It will not always be omnipotent. (2) Build broad rules, not narrow interests - The United States should not pursue selfish interests abroad but establish a structure of rules, practices, and values through which the world will be bound. (3) Be Bismarck, not Britain - The United States has good relations with almost every country, and it should use those connections for good. (4) Order a la carte – The United States should fix individual problems rather than forcing one dimensional solutions. (5) Think asymmetrically - The US should avoid being drawn into expensive traps by smaller opponents (like Osama Bin Laden). Not everything can be handled with brute strength, America should utilize creative responses. (6) Legitimacy is power - Building coalitions with popular support raises America's global legitimacy.
Critique
'The Post-American World' taught me a lot about statistics and how leftist thinkers imagine American decline. Throughout the book, Zakaria is routinely bogged down by numerous trivial factors related to modern world developments. I couldn't help but think he has a shallow perspective on the deeper forces working underneath the rise and fall of civilizations. Zakaria seems to adhere to a materialistic worldview, and he almost never addressed the more fundamental issues of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Nor does he discuss the decay of Western Civilization's core principles (like Christianity).
Zakaria discusses the rise and fall of Western countries in order to outline his "rise of the rest" scenario, but he doesn't take into account that all those Western states rose and fell within Western Civilization. Even as the falling Western powers were collapsing, they were simultaneously still contributing to the development of the rising power that was also a member of the West. There's little reason to assume that countries like China and India, which fall completely outside the Western world, will follow the trajectories of countries like Britain or Germany. Zakaria never extends his civilizational study past the Western experience, and thus his whole assessment of the rise of non-Western nations is built on the experiences of those in the West. Zakaria can seem convincing, but he picks and chooses which attributes of the Western world he wants to use to assess the non-Western, and thus he ignores the most important reasons why the West, and particularly the United States, were capable of rising in the first place.
Zakaria falsely attributes the political deadlock in America to a series of factors that are all surface level symptoms of our real diversity problem. His claims about immigration into the United States are all skewed by an eighth grade perception of the Irish and Italian waves that arrived in the first part of the twentieth century. There were times while reading when I felt as though he was either completely ignorant of certain historical periods or just picking random facts that seemed to support his thesis. However, I was glad to see that he didn't fall into the "China is going to take over the world" trap. He seems to have enough knowledge to realize that neither China nor India can overtake the United States.
Zakaria's six proscriptions, about what American should do to retain its position, sound like a mushy pathetic globalist self-help manual, and the prescriptions feel like they were jotted down in order to avoid the book being scrutinized as a pointless fortune telling experiment. Instead of addressing massive internal problems, like the largest historical human migration/invasion at our southern border, or the collapse of our population's morality and birth rates, Zakaria chooses to focus on "building legitimacy" and making ourselves into the most popular nation. Zakaria's greatest weakness is that he's a shallow historian and sociologist. He can't see the cancer below the healthy skin, and he doesn't seem to be able to appreciate the power of anything beyond the material.