Personalizes the U.S.'s challenges while providing a non-provincialist perspective

books:

	• The Post-American World Fareed Zakaria W. W. Norton & Company, 2009 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 264 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wake Up America!

The single superpower reigned for a decade or two. We've moved back to the normal historical situation of multilateralism. How do we get our elites, business leaders and congressman to understand? The author provides all of the background needed to understand. Thank you.

Personalizes the U.S.'s challenges while providing a non-provincialist perspective

Fareed Zakaria concludes Post-American world with the following simple challenge, "For America to thrive in this new and challenging era, for it to succeed amid the rise of the rest, it need fulfill only one test. It should be a place that is as inviting and exciting to the young student who enters the country today as it was for this awkward eighteen-year-old a generation ago." [In 1982 Mr. Zakaria emigrated from India to attend college here in the U.S.]

Mr. Zakaria accomplishes a seemingly impossible task; he personalizes how recent, current, and predicted economic events are shaping the world while also providing his American readers with perspectives other major economies have of the U.S., while also helping us understand these other economies' realities and objectives from their perspective, especially China and India.

This is not a book exclusively for policy or economic wonks, but instead a book easily comprehended by the general reader even without any college economics under their belt. It's also a relatively short, but always interesting read. There's lot of interesting bits of trivia as well that help provide prospective on the successes of the past and the challenges for the future.

One of Mr. Zakaria's biggest strengths is both his passion for enlightenment values coupled to his dispassionate, unbiased ability to critically analyze events and even ideological movements. He brings an immigrant's zeal to America's founding principles that's always welcomed; while his coupling of passion and dispassion allows him to correctly assess why democratic India failed to achieve the type of growth rates the communist party delivered for China during the same period, in spite of India's natural advantages like the pervasiveness of English in schools and businesses. It helps him assess the primary driver that led China to move from an ideological and failing framework when setting policies to a more rational and successful framework starting in the late-1970s - a lesson badly needed to be learned by American conservatives who are now far more wedded to flawed ideological concepts regarding their political platforms than the Chinese communists who govern their country and are realizing such enormous economic growth rates while using sound economic principles and focused discipline to stimulate their economy out of the global recession, attributes actually rejected by American conservatives when recently wielding political power and even more out of style since losing power.

Mr. Zakaria also brings an economist's dispassionate and quantitatively-centric skills to confronting hyperbolic political rhetoric leveraged by those who depend on fear tactics to win electoral office or attract people to their political movements, e.g., noting why Muslim immigration into Europe is an over-hyped concern while noting other challenges deserving far more energy and focus if Europe is to thrive economically in the future.

While the analysis is both dispassionate and unbiased, the tone of the book is consistently upbeat. Why not? Global adoption of regulated capitalism is creating increased median income and wealth across the globe, there are no effectively competing economic models, the most advanced nations with few exceptions have figured out how to compete in a global market while also vastly decreasing its citizens being deprived of shelter, food, education, and health care. The opening of the world to the marketplace while more citizens move into the working or middle class has also opened new market opportunities for even more mature economies like America, Japan, and Europe. In essence, the world is mimicking the American and European economic models. So we have more challengers and must up our game; but we also simultaneously enjoy access to a far bigger increase in our total available market to sell into which is enjoying far higher growth rates than we could yield domestically.

Given the reality that Europe has been rebuilt since WWII and Asia is becoming ever more economically independent, the question for the U.S. is, "How do we compete given the rise of India, China, and Europe, grow our domestic economy, and maintain better security in world where violent asymmetrical tactics yield disproportionate results?" Mr. Zakaria's answer is the primary thesis of his last two chapters, "American Power" and "American Purpose".

These chapters' answers, (which I consider spoilers and therefore won't define) solidified my previously held position; that there is a single root cause and corrective solution that would allow Zakaria's or even superior recommendations to take root and flourish. Our primary obstacle is one of political will from conservatives to discard talking points proven to fail or impossible to implement and to instead become pro-intellectual in looking for optimal arguments.

We have a large political movement, a mutated, far from Burkean/Oakeshottian form of ungovernable conservatism which has taken over one of America's two political parties and is increasingly unserious in confronting and dealing with our challenges from both a historically valid perspective and implementing the best counsel from the best relevant functional experts available. Conservatives near total divorce from reality is not only infecting the Republican's ability to promote optimal policies, but also forcing the Democrats to promote policies far less optimal than they'd be if they were effectively challenged from the right. (Republicans historically relied not on conservatives but the plutocrats' economists for economic leadership, the GOP now mostly ignores their own experts when crafting policy positions given their own experts dispute their talking points.)

My personal perception is not meant to convey that Mr. Zakaria directs disproportionate ire towards only the American Republican Party or conservatives. In fact the book purposefully avoids attributing many of its observations to political parties or political movements. Instead Mr. Zakaria's skewerings when utilized are both dead-on and fairly disbursed. It's merely my observation that if the Democrats' current policy weaknesses were skillfully challenged by the Republicans, that we'd see a big convergence on implementing best practices relative to the interests and challenges of the country as described by Mr. Zakaria in this book. But we aren't.

Mr. Zakaria provides a great road map to the future, its entirely up to us whether our two major parties will consider his advice wedded in historical precedents and best practices being realized around the globe or instead yield to teabaggers and unthinkingly submit to Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh for mere talking points. During the Clinton years and now in the age of Obama, the Left seems to have yielded to what experts like Mr. Zakaria lays-out after entering their own wilderness of failures in the 1960s through 1980s. Will the Right now heed the call? We need them more than ever.

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Best book on international relations I've read in a long time

This is an outstanding book on international relations and the probable roles of the United States, China, and India in the twenty-first century. Zakaria is not predicting the decline of the United States. Instead Zakaria believes the economic growth of China, and to a lesser extent, India, will lead to a world with several, more equal world powers. Zakaria's Indian upbringing, U.S. citizenship, and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard give him a unique insight that most authors and journalists lack.

This book is far better than it's current four-star rating suggests. Unfortunately, its average rating is held back by a few xenophobic anti-globalists.

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Points Missing

A brief summary of America (the Empire) today and how the 'rise of the rest' as China & India catch up to our standard of living, will be a future challenge. Too bad Fareed isn't a biologist or did some simple compounding math. Fareed fails to address how we will accommodate 3 billion more souls in the next 40 years and the environmental destruction that will follow. As E.O. Wilson pointed out in 2002 "The Bottleneck" Scientific American, for '...the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths'. That was written when there were 6 billion people...how many Earths are needed when there are 9 billion in 2050? Fareed has no answer except increase GDP which he mentions over and over as if this is the only measure of progress. What about an equitable society with health care, education and food security for all...not in America. He ignores the 75+ and counting countries America has either occupied or overthrown in the past 50 years, some democratically elected (Chile, Iran, Congo, Panama, Ecuador to name a few) see The Economic Hit Man. And the 120 plus countries occupied by American troops making the world safe for McDonalds and McDonnell-Douglas. Corporate taxes are too high at 35% says Fareed but he fails to mention that few pay it. Some fortune 500 companies pay nothing while the effective corporate tax rate is just 13.4% and total corporate taxes as a percentage of total US tax revenue has declined by 2/3s since 1960 (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [...]). Onward the corptocracy! Flat, Crowded and Hot is a better read but still worships at the altar of capitalism. Of course we've seen how well capitalism works for the poor, shrinking middle class and homeless while socialism (bailouts) has fattened the already bloated Wallstreet banksters.

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Zakaria's perspective on the obvious changes around us

Talks about the emergence and reemergence of other nations and civilizations and the decline of America in relative terms. I haven't spent much time on books that explain the new 'geopolitical realignment' and the 'new power structure' etc etc, so I don't know how this book would stack in relative terms but seems fairly good. There probably isn't anything fundamentally new you are going to come across in this book, it's pretty much stating the obvious in a structured manner. The stats in the initial part of the book is particularly interesting, ex. income per person (3.2 %) rose the highest between 2000 and 2007 than any other period in history, the doubling of the global economy between 1999 and 2008 and so on. There is a good attempt to trace the history (scientific, literary and military) of the Chinese, Arabs and Indians and attempts to explain that the rise of china (and India) should not come as a surprise give their achievements in ancient times. It's kind of hard to agree or disagree on some of these points; for example, it says that just a few centuries earlier China was the most technologically advanced nation based on gunpowder, stirrups etc, we will have to just wait and see how things turn out. I totally agree when the author states that Americas greatest asset (and increasingly the only differentiating asset I would think) is it's higher education infrastructure and America's continuing inability to fix its immigration policy is probably going to be the decisive factor in its decline.The other day I was watching a documentary on the Manhattan project and and it just reinforces this fact.

I noticed a few errors; for example, while talking about Middle East the author says "The Middle East was at the forefront of civilization, preserving and building on Greek and Roman knowledge and producing path breaking work in fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, medicine, anthropology and psychology. Arabic numerals were invented there, as was the concept of zero". It is a fact that the region had contributed greatly to science by the extensive works on people like Al khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna(persian) and others, but the last sentence is factually incorrect. I hope the stats and points mentioned in the book are backed by sufficient research.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

?Zakaria . . . may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West.? ?Boston Sunday Globe ?This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.? So begins Fareed Zakaria?s blockbusting bestseller on the United States in the twenty-first century. How can Americans understand this rapidly changing international climate, and how might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

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