the post american world and the rise of the rest

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.

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. Zakaria himself writes of a 'cottage industry of scaremongering' in western countries since 9/11. It has to be said that one's heart tends to sink as yet another rise and decline volume drops on the desk. In China, as Zakaria interestingly reveals, a recent television series on the great powers attracted large audiences. 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. 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. 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. McNeil was influenced by Toynbee, a quotation from whom introduces Zakaria's book. Gibbon, of course, lurks in the background. 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. The preoccupation with rise and fall is as old as power itself. 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. 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. One of Zakaria's title chapters, 'The Rise of the Rest', sums up his thesis.

The post american world and the rise of the rest