Touch Points by Steve Finikiotis

In his compelling new book, “The Post-American World,” Newsweek Int’l’s Fareed Zakaria reframes the challenges and opportunities of a new world order. Zakaria argues that we’ve entered a “post-American” era in which the role of the U.S. will be diminished but not irrelevant.

While the U.S. still possesses unique, natural advantages, “the rise of the rest,” including China, India and Brazil, among others, are creating a world through their economic growth that is more multi-focal. Other nations are now catching up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion.  What’s next for the U.S. in this new world order remains to be seen.

Zakaria argues that America has assumed that its innate strengths – academic resources, free markets and diversity of talent – can compensate for its anemic savings rate or the absence of a health care system or a cogent, long-term economic strategy.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are working hard, saving well and are looking ahead. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game”.  He  worries that “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”

According to Zakaria, the U.S. still has significant natural advantages. But the new worry for America is neither the rise of other societies, nor its own diminsihing influence, but Washington’s politics of stagnation and partisanship in recent years.  Zakaria argues that anachronistic systems of government hijacked by vested interests are having a drag on the agility and innovativeness that led to America’s rise in the last century. As David Singh Grewal notes in his new book, Network Power, “Everything is being globalized except politics.”

Zakaria makes his case skillfully. His argument should inspire a broader conversation during this election cycle about how to shift attention to the new challenges and opportunities of a multi-focal world. Rather than engage in the same tired debate about restoring America’s lustre, it makes sense to weigh the options as seen through the prism of a post-American world.