The Post-american World

For Fareed Zakaria, the great story of our times is ‘the rise of the rest’–the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and Kenya, which is generating a new global landscape. Global power is shifting, and wealth and innovation are bubbling up in unexpected places: the tallest buildings, biggest dams, top-selling movies and most advanced mobile phones are all being built or made outside the United States. Countries that until recently lacked political confidence and national pride are finding them. As these trends continue, the great engine of globalization will increasingly be powered by nationalism, setting the world on a course that is likely to define the next decades, yet which it is not yet equipped to tackle. The current political debate in much of the first world is utterly out of touch with this broad development, obsessed with issues like terrorism, immigration and economic panics. The real challenges we face come from the winners not the losers of the new world.

Zakaria outlines the contemporary diffusion of power throughout the world. With lucidity, insight and imagination, he draws on lessons from the two great power shifts of the past 500 years–the rise of the Western world and the rise of the United States–to tell us what we can expect from the third shift. The great challenge for Britain in the twentieth century was economic decline. The challenge for America in the twenty-first is political decline, for as others grow in importance, the central role of the United States will inevitably shrink. Zakaria argues that Washington needs to begin a serious transformation of its global strategy, moving from being the dominating hegemon to a role that is more like an honest broker. It must seek to share power, create coalitions, build legitimacy and defi ne the global agenda – all formidable tasks. None of this will be easy for the only power that has really mattered for so long. But as we learn in this incisive and eloquent new book, all that is changing now. The future the world faces is the post-American world.