![]() Global capitalism has been a huge success. He points out that, aside from some pockets of backwardness, the whole world has been getting much richer. Zakaria, who is judicious, reasonable, smooth, intelligent, and a little glib, predicts nothing so rash. (He is fond of quoting Oswald Spengler-always a bad sign.) Khanna, for his part, describes a vigorous East united against a more and more decadent West. He envisages a clash between the global constellation of democracies and the nouveau-riche autocracies. Protecting the Free World, Kagan thinks, will require a stiffer military backbone. ![]() Others say that it’s naïve-so very “old Enlightenment,” as Robert Kagan, the author of “The Return of History and the End of Dreams” (Knopf $19.95), puts it-to imagine that the aggressive ambitions of great nations can be muzzled that way. At the start of “The Post-American World” (Norton $25.95), Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, states that his book is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else.” He’s among those who argue that the newly rich powers should be embedded quickly and snugly in international institutions such as the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. But, even if we aren’t so quick to write off America’s cultural, political, economic, and military clout, the fact that the American economy has to rely on infusions of cash from China, Singapore, and the Gulf states suggests that something important is taking place.Įxactly what is happening, and with what consequences, are matters of dispute. Economic statistics in autocracies such as China are notoriously unreliable, and it’s worth recalling all those breathless predictions, a few decades ago, of Japan’s imminent global domination. There are good reasons for skepticism about such grand forecasts. But that’s the kind of language we are beginning to hear, now that American “hyper-power” (as a former French foreign minister liked to call it) is being challenged. It has been a while since policy mavens have used terms like “destiny” with a straight face. Because of the East, the West is no longer master of its own fate.” Mark Leonard, the author of “What Does China Think?” (PublicAffairs $22.95), reports, with more enthusiasm than plausibility, that “a town the size of London shoots up in the Pearl River Delta every year.” Parag Khanna, in “The Second World” (Random House $29), informs us, rather gleefully, that “Asia is shaping the world’s destiny-and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process. The spectacle of Chinese turbo-capitalism is inspiring Marco Polo-like awe in some Western commentators. By the late twenty-twenties, China could overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy. In “Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade” (Harcourt $26), the former Economist editor Bill Emmott refers to a World Bank analysis predicting that both China and India “could almost triple their economic output” in the next ten years or so. ![]() Still, the current economic growth of China-and also of India and Russia-is impressive. Why spend so much money and effort if not to keep the barbarians at bay? Perhaps, as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy suggested in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” empires need the sense of peril to give them a reason to go on. It’s an idea that has had as much currency within the United States as elsewhere.Īll great empires set too much store by predictions of their imminent demise. The latest one to do so, in policy think tanks, universities, foreign ministries, corporate boardrooms, editorial offices, and international conference centers, is that America’s time of global dominance is finished, and that new powers, such as China, India, and Russia, are poised to take over. Parag Khanna sees a decadent West confronting a united Asia: “Because of the East, the West is no longer master of its own fate.” Illustration by Seymour ChwastĮvery so often, a grand thesis captures the world’s imagination, at least until it is swept away by events or by a newer, more plausible thesis. ![]()
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