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Premonitory Pundit
Fareed Zakaria believes the US should enact reforms to navigate the new world.
- By Utku Cakirozer, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 00:06 June 27, 2008
The world's tallest building rises in Taipei, Taiwan, while the largest factory and shopping mall sprawls in China. Nine of the globe's ten biggest shopping centres are not in the United States.
The planet's largest casino isn't in Las Vegas — it is in Macao. Bollywood is bigger than Hollywood — both for the number of films made and the number of tickets sold.
So what are Americans to make of these indicators that they are lagging? For Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a frequent guest and commentator on an array of broadcast news programmes, these are signs of a global trend of other nations threatening to surpass the US.
In his new book The Post-American World, Zakaria claims the US remains the global military and political superpower, but “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social and cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance''.
Third World first
This will be the third global “tectonic power shift'', he says, in the last 500 years. The first was the rise of Western Europe in the 15th century, producing modernity, science, commerce and the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Then, he says, the world witnessed the American ascent in the 19th century, with the US domination of global economics, politics, science and culture.
Now Zakaria sees a third great transformation, with China, India and many other developing nations experiencing enormous economic growth, creating a “truly global order'' in which huge swaths of the planet no longer serve as others' objects but become players in their own right.
Further, power not only will be diffused among nations but also from them to international bodies and non-governmental organisations.
This hybrid system will be more democratic, dynamic, free and interconnected, he says, adding that it will prevail as the post-American world for decades.
“Nothing lasts forever,'' Zakaria said in an interview. “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was writing of an age of American unipolarity.
"It was an accurate description of the world that we lived in then. American power has been unrivalled. What I point out now is that this age is coming to an end.''
His message has found an audience. In Los Angeles recently, the buzz built about an appearance by this Brahmin of foreign policy pundit-ocracy.
Organisers of Los Angeles's Central Library's Aloud author programme had to turn away half as many Zakaria fans as were able to pack the 238-seat auditorium.
Part of the local clamour for the plain-spoken but aristocratic former editor of Foreign Affairs might stem from the largely friendly praise that his latest book has drawn from reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and The Washington Post.
Although some reviewers have expressed scepticism about aspects of his thesis, BusinessWeek, for one, called his analysis “sobering''.
To people who heard him at the Los Angeles programme, Zakaria carried an important message in a persuasive manner.
He was “well-informed and objective, (and) seemed to be right on track'', said Hardy Thomas.
Although he is only 44, the world has taken note of the Indian-born author. His father was a leader of India's Congress Party, his mother a senior editor at the Times of India.
Zakaria was educated at Yale and Harvard. He distinguished himself not only as an editor for Foreign Affairs and Newsweek but also with his TV show and a bestselling book, The Future of Freedom.
Profiles about him draw appraisals from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger and Council on Foreign Affairs president Emeritus Leslie Gelb.
Message for the US
To navigate the new world, Zakaria said the US must retain its strengths: a competitive economy, a good education system and a diverse, vibrant people.
But it must change what he deems its “dysfunctional'' political system.
American leaders, who for decades “have gone around the world telling countries ‘Open up your markets to trade, to the modern world, to the kind of an American model''', he says, now find themselves and their society “bewildered, surprised, outraged or fearful (of globalisation).
While the world is opening and changing, the great danger is that we are closing down.''
What to do instead? “A set of sensible reforms could be enacted tomorrow,'' he writes, “to trim wasteful spending and subsidies, increase savings, expand training in science and technology, secure pensions, create a workable immigration process and achieve significant efficiencies in the use of energy.
"And yet because of politics they appear impossible. A ‘can-do' country is now saddled with a ‘do-nothing' political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving''.
“If we want to succeed and thrive in a post-American world,'' Zakaria said, “rather than blaming foreigners ... we should get our own house in order.''
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