![]() ![]() 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? 2, but in dollar terms, America spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined. China’s defense budget may be the world’s No. The “hard stuff” military clout is certainly central. What about the shifting tides of power? In the affairs of nations, “power” is more complex than in physics. American output would still be about one-quarter of the world total, the average for the past 125 years, as Zakaria reminds us. This is a silly game, but no more inane than those projections that see China overtaking the United States as early as 2020. Assume now that the United States will grow at its historical rate of 3.5 percent. to $6 trillion in 10 years and double it again to $12 trillion by 2028. Assume indefinite Chinese growth of 7 percent. is about $3 trillion, while America’s is $14 trillion. “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. So why worry? “The problem is size,” Zakaria writes. 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. 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. 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.īut for China it’s up, up and away. 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. ![]()
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