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Author Notes
Fareed Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India on January 20, 1964. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in political science in 1993 from Harvard University.
He was the managing editor of Foreign Affairs before becoming the editor of Newsweek International in 2000. He writes a weekly foreign affairs column in the publication and also has a weekly show on CNN called Fareed Zakaria GPS. Prior to that he worked as a news analyst from 2002 to 2007 on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos and hosted the weekly show Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS. He is the author of several books including The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and In Defense of a Liberal Education.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing on a variety of research, Zakaria eloquently explains the changing trends in world hegemony as other countries continue to grow and compete with the U.S. in the global market. Zakaria carefully explains how the economic, social, political and cultural growth of other countries, in particular China and India, will improve the overall progress of civilization. He also examines what some of these changes will mean for U.S. society as it attempts to re-imagine itself in this emerging paradigm. Zakaria narrates his audiobook with an uncommon ease. He makes for an interesting narrator with his light and crisp Indian accent that, given the nature of this non-American thesis, adds an element of legitimacy to his words. His deliberate pacing allows for listeners to appreciate and follow some of the more complex elements within the text. A W.W. Norton hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 25). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
American crises seem to produce two kinds of diagnosticians, those who want to scare their readers and those who want to reassure them. Fareed Zakaria is in the second category. As the economies of China and India expand and their political reach extends, is America's position in the world threatened? This particular doctor says no, concluding that everything will be all right provided the patient lies down in a darkened room for a while, and, above all, thinks a little less about himself and a little more about other people. One of Zakaria's title chapters, "The Rise of the Rest", sums up his thesis. Other powers, notably India and China, are rising, but this does not mean, he argues, that America will lose the control of world affairs to which it is so accustomed. It will suffer some relative decline, but can still remain top nation, if it learns how to broker and mediate the relationships of other nations in the manner of Bismarck, and ceases to try to dictate in the manner of George W Bush, or even in the manner of Bill Clinton. The preoccupation with rise and fall is as old as power itself. Zakaria's "Rise of the Rest" is perhaps a reworking of the title of the Canadian-American historian William McNeil's fine world history The Rise of the West , published many years ago, the title of which in turn was probably a play on Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West . Gibbon, of course, lurks in the background. McNeil was influenced by Toynbee, a quotation from whom introduces Zakaria's book. Paul Kennedy's 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , with its notion of imperial "overstretch", for a while had an almost mesmeric effect on Americans. Over recent years rise and decline books have come off the presses at a smart rate, with Samuel Huntingdon and Niall Ferguson among the more notable names. In the last couple of months, Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, and Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat and scholar, have entered the fray with books on the rise of the Asian powers. In China, as Zakaria interestingly reveals, a recent television series on the great powers attracted large audiences. It has to be said that one's heart tends to sink as yet another rise and decline volume drops on the desk. Zakaria himself writes of a "cottage industry of scaremongering" in western countries since 9/11. Is Osama over? Will China blow up or grow up? Is India the future of IT? Is democracy dished, Russia resurgent, and Europe enfeebled? Is America at the crossroads? As writers jostle to produce one of those "big ideas" which seem to explain everything, it is tempting to conclude that there are easier ways of getting a headache, or to think wistfully of butterflies, or of children playing in the sun. The editor of Newsweek International, Zakaria is the author of a well received book on democracy which argued, at a time when the Bush administration was pouring out simplistic rhetoric, that the crude imposition of bits of democratic machinery would lead many societies in anything but a democratic direction. He brings a sharp mind and an eye for detail, example and anecdote to his task in his new book. His style is generally readable and succinct, although his occasional news magazine mannerisms can grate. Why should Burma be "tiny", for example? He also has a habit of announcing that something is not well-known when, like Admiral Zheng He's 15th-century voyages, it is very well known indeed. But he makes some good broader points in the declinist debate. One is that the parallel between Britain's slow dwindling and America's present difficulties is misleading. He suggests that Britain's empire was for a long time a well-managed bluff, while America's is an ill-managed but hard fact. He sensibly downgrades the threat from Islamist terror. He has unearthed educational statistics which indicate that Chinese and Indian figures for science and technical graduates are inflated, which leads him to conclude that higher education is America's best industry. He is good, too, on the decline of truly national politics in India, and on China's curious capacity to combine serious corruption with relatively high levels of competence. Yet there is not a word in his China chapter about Tibet or about the likelihood that China's plans for the future envisage the Hanification of that third of the country which is not Chinese. There is a kind of bias toward power as a phenomenon in his treatment of both India and China. And when it comes to America, even though the author clearly wants to see a more modest and skilful United States on the world scene, this bent is very apparent. Zakaria, who came to the US from India as a student and stayed to become a citizen, has drunk deeply from the exceptionalist cup. The intellectual quest for ways to ground American power is vital, for him, because America is uniquely necessary to the world. Even as he argues that other countries have their own interests and ideologies, he dismisses Hugo Chavez's "insane rants" and refers without explanation to Iran as a "rogue state". Surely there are questions here that should be answered rather than begged. His book ends with a sort of personal love letter to the US. It is therefore not surprising that he posits a best of all post-American worlds and a world that is still, in spite of his title, a very American one indeed. To order The Post-American World for pounds 18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-zakaria.1 The preoccupation with rise and fall is as old as power itself. [Zakaria]'s "Rise of the Rest" is perhaps a reworking of the title of the Canadian-American historian William McNeil's fine world history The Rise of the West , published many years ago, the title of which in turn was probably a play on Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West . Gibbon, of course, lurks in the background. McNeil was influenced by Toynbee, a quotation from whom introduces Zakaria's book. Paul Kennedy's 1987 work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , with its notion of imperial "overstretch", for a while had an almost mesmeric effect on Americans. Over recent years rise and decline books have come off the presses at a smart rate, with Samuel Huntingdon and Niall Ferguson among the more notable names. In the last couple of months, Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, and Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat and scholar, have entered the fray with books on the rise of the Asian powers. In China, as Zakaria interestingly reveals, a recent television series on the great powers attracted large audiences. - Martin Woollacott.
New York Review of Books Review
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. Now, two decades on, it is the much-hyped "great power shift" toward Asia that will turn the United States into a has-been. At first blush, "The Post-American World," by Fareed Zakaria, seems to fall into the same genre. But make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. 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. Yet Zakaria's is not another exercise in declinism. 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. The real problem, Zakaria argues, is the rise of China, trailed by India. 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 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. But for China it's up, up and away. As Zakaria memorably puts it, "China today exports in a single day more than it exported in all of 1|978." Authoritarian modernization just hums along. 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. With power safely lodged in the Politburo, China does not conform to the historical pattern of "first rich, then rowdy," which led to Tokyo's and Berlin's imperialist careers. A skyline rises in Shanghai, 2004. So why worry? "The problem is size," Zakaria writes. "China operates on so large a scale that it can't help changing the nature of the game." True, but let's play another game, that of compound interest. China's (nominal) G.D.P. is about $3 trillion, while America's is $14 trillion. Assume indefinite Chinese growth of 7 percent. That will double G.D.P. to $6 trillion in 10 years and double it again to $12 trillion by 2028. Assume now that the United States will grow at its historical rate of 3.5 percent. By 2028, G.D.P. will measure $28 trillion. This is a silly game, but no more inane than those projections that see China overtaking the United States as early as 2020. American output would still be about one-quarter of the world total, the average for the past 125 years, as Zakaria reminds us. What about the shifting tides of power? In the affairs of nations, "power" is more complex than in physics. The "hard stuff" - military clout - is certainly central. China's defense budget may be the world's No. 2, but in dollar terms, America spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Hence, might - at least American might - doesn't just "grow out of the barrel of a gun," as Mao Zedong famously had it; "it's the economy, stupid." Will America stay on top - devaluation, deficits and all? So, let's look at a related determinant of power: culture. Again, Zakaria proceeds more subtly than the run-of-the-mill declinist by stressing American advantages not captured by growth rates and export surpluses. He rightly takes on the old saw to the effect that China produces 600,000 engineers a year, India 350,000 and the United States only 70,000. This is true if you include "auto mechanics and industrial repairmen" in the Asian totals. Subtract them, and America "actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China does." The larger point is that "higher education is America's best industry" - never mind the creeping demise of Detroit's Big Three. "With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States absolutely dominates higher education, having either 42 or 68 percent of the world's top 50 universities" (depending on who is counting). In India, he adds, "universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.'s in computer science each year; in America the figure is 1,000." Now, Beijing is pouring oodles into its universities, but so did Austin, Tex., in the oil-rich '70s, and Stanford et al. are still on top. In the industrial age, hardware mattered; today it is software, aka "culture." This is a grab bag: skills, openness, innovation, opportunity, competition. "It's brains, stupid," Bill Clinton might exclaim today. And youth. China, Japan and Europe are aging rapidly; the United States will remain a young country way into the 21st century. And why? Immigration is "America's secret weapon." In my Stanford class, the A's regularly go to students called Kim, Zhou, Patel or Vertiz; these are not the "huddled masses," but their children - the gifted and hungry who will slough off the old and drive the new. "First rich, then fat and lazy" will not be America's fate. What's the problem, then? "America remains the global superpower today, but it is an enfeebled one." It has blown wads of political capital, but it is still better positioned to manage the "rise of the rest" than its rivals. Europe is rich, but placid and graying. Resurgent Russia is too grabby. China is more subtle in its ambitions, but still a classic revisionist that wants more for itself and less for the whole. It craves respect but will choose bloody repression in the crunch, as in Tibet. THE United States, too, has acted the bully in recent years, and it has paid dearly. Still, why does it retain "considerable ability to set the agenda," to quote Zakaria? How can it muster the convening power that brings 80 nations to Annapolis? The short answer (mine) is: America remains the "default power"; others may fear it, but who else will take care of global business? Maybe it takes a liberal, seafaring empire, as opposed to the Russian or the Habsburg, to temper power and self-interest with responsibility for the rest. And maybe it takes a Bombay-born immigrant like Zakaria, who went from Yale to Harvard (where we were colleagues) and to the top of Newsweek International, to remind this faltering giant of its unique and enduring strengths. America will be in trouble only when China becomes home to tomorrow's hungry masses yearning to be free - and to make it. Josef Joffe is the publisher-editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg and a senior fellow at Stanford. His latest book is "Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America."
