The Twilight of Supremacy

By Brendan Simms
Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Post-American World
By Fareed Zakaria
(Norton, 292 pages, $25.95)

Among those who comment on America's place in the world there are plenty of Cassandras. They see a global theater dominated by one dire threat after another – an assertive China, a revanchist Russia, a nuclear-armed Iran, not to mention a fanatical terrorist brigade. They differ among themselves over who is to blame for such threats and what is to be done about them. But the world they look out on is an even more "dangerous place" than the one Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke about nearly three decades ago.

Amid such gloom, it is refreshing to read Fareed Zakaria, who writes with infectious (though not naïve) sunniness. In "The Post-American World" he makes a passionate case that the U.S., along with the other great democracies that won the Cold War, will continue to prevail. He concedes that – with America in imperial overstretch and the economies of India and China surging ahead – the era of U.S. dominance is over. But we should not worry too much about such relative decline, because the post-American world will be, well, very American.

Globalization, Mr. Zakaria notes, is not only economically beneficial for most of the world's citizens, helping to lift millions out of terrible poverty, but also irreversible. Moreover, the recent past has shown that "a market-based economy that achieves middle-income status tends, over the long run, toward liberal democracy." New powers like China, however ideologically intractable, can be brought into the global society of states. Meanwhile, the economies of the U.S. and other Western countries will continue to possess a competitive advantage in all sorts of goods and services.

In short, Mr. Zakaria declares, "the world is going America's way." Most important, "countries are becoming more open, market friendly, and democratic." To propel this trend, he says, the U.S. needs to abide by the rules of international conduct and to cultivate "legitimacy" – its own and those of emerging powers – through multilateral organizations such as the United Nations.

Mr. Zakaria makes his case with eloquence but without Panglossian simplicity. He acknowledges, for instance, that the surging economies of the former Third World may give a boost to global inflation, threatening prosperity: The demand for commodities, he notes, is so great that "humble" helium, the second most abundant element in the universe – used in microchips and party balloons – is now in short supply. And alongside globalizing forces can be seen angry nationalist or "subnationalist" ones, disrupting the effort to integrate newcomers into "the Western order." All the more need, he would say, for international organizations to do their harmonizing and legitimizing work.

It is a persuasive argument – if only up to a point. By claiming that a dispersal of global prosperity will shift the global balance of power, Mr. Zakaria too often links national power with national wealth. He says that Britain was the dominant global force between about 1840 and 1880 – it was certainly the world's economic powerhouse – and yet it was unable to prevent the unification of Germany in 1871, the greatest geopolitical transformation of the period and the one that most threatened Britain's own strategic position.

By contrast, the People's Republic of China was an economic basket case in the 1950s and 1960s, when it fought the U.S. to a standstill in a major land war in Korea and a proxy conflict in Vietnam. Since then, China's economy has risen meteorically, yet it is weaker both politically and militarily, in relative terms. Thanks to the Revolution in Military Affairs – the application of new communications and computer technology to the battlefield – U.S. military power is all the greater. And of course Mr. Zakaria knows well enough that postwar Japan and Germany and the countries of the European Union, though economic giants, have been political dwarves.

Nor will everybody agree with the idea that the world is going America's way. Even if one leaves aside Islamist terrorism and nuclear proliferation, there are disturbing signs in Lebanon, Venezuela, Russia and elsewhere that authoritarian or sectarian alternatives to parliamentary government are gaining the upper hand. A recent survey shows that, for the first time since 1974, the world's democracies are in numerical decline. It surely remains the case that U.S. power will be required either to help states that are not able to manage the democratic transformation under their own steam or to prevent democratic states from succumbing once more to tyranny.

All this points to a third difficulty: When should U.S. power be applied, assuming that it still has a crucial role to play in a post-American world? Mr. Zakaria has been called a "liberal hawk": He supported the invasion of Iraq and the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein (as did I). He does not pretend that the outcome so far has been anything other than deeply problematic, perhaps with implications for future interventions. Simply to shunt his stance on the Iraq war to a footnote, as Mr. Zakaria does, is not good enough. (He writes that he "underestimated not merely the administration's arrogance and incompetence but also the inherent difficulty of the task.")

At the very least, he should reflect on the difficult relation between individual judgment and the abstract principles of statecraft. Mr. Zakaria criticizes the unilateralism of the Bush administration generally and its disregard for international legitimacy. Yet he rightly praises President Clinton for intervening in Kosovo in the late 1990s without a U.N. mandate. The point is that there is no a priori way to resolve the often contradictory dictates of international legality and pressing humanitarian need.

It may well be that, in a post-American world, Washington will have to tread more carefully than the present administration has done. But it will still be a world that requires not just American power but an American willingness to break the "rules" in a just cause. For there is no general principle that will prevent the U.S. from doing harm that will not also prevent it from doing good.