The Party’s message reads “Enrich yourselves, but leave the driving to us,” and most of 1.3 billion Chinese seem happy to comply and to consume. As Zakaria memorably puts it, “China today exports in a single day more than it exported in all of 1978.” Authoritarian modernization just hums along. The United States, Germany and Japan had similar tales to tell in the late 19th century, but bust was the price of boom, and for Germany as well as Japan (add Russia, too), headlong industrialization ended in the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism.īut for China it’s up, up and away. China’s is indeed the most incredible success story in history a tale of almost 30 years of growth in the 7-to-10-percent range that seems to defy the laws of economic gravity. The real problem, Zakaria argues, is the rise of China, trailed by India. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the “rise of the rest.” After all, how can this giant follow Rome and Britain onto the dust heap of empire if it can prosecute two wars at once without much notice at home? The granddaughters of those millions of Rosie the Riveters who kept the World War II economy going are off to the mall today if they don’t shop till they drop, it’s because of recession, not rationing. Yet Zakaria’s is not another exercise in declinism.

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. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse.

Now, two decades on, it is the much-hyped “great power shift” toward Asia that will turn the United States into a has-been.Īt first blush, “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, seems to fall into the same genre.

Every 20 years or so, the end of America is nigh ever since the 18th century when, in France, Comte de Buffon fingered the country as a den of degeneracy while Abbé Raynal slammed its cultural poverty: America had not yet produced “one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius.” In 1987, in his book “ The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” the Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw the United States on the road to perdition this, four years before the suicide of the Soviet Union, which left America all alone in the penthouse of global power.

The post american world