The Post-American World

“The conventional wisdom was that when the West sneezed, the rest would catch pneumonia—that had been the experience in the past. But this time, emerging nations of the world had achieved a critical mass and were now able to withstand the dramatic decline in growth in the Western world. In fact, in retrospect, it seems wrong even to describe it as ‘the global financial crisis.’ For China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia, this has not been much of a crisis.”

Providing a Preface for the second edition of the book, Zakaria notes how the Great Recession of 2008 bolsters his thesis not only in terms of delegitimizing the heretofore dominant financial institutions of the West but also in that the crisis has had far less of an impact in the developing world than in the West. Although globalization clearly involves a profound degree of interconnectedness, there is also evidence that rising nations are no longer as dependent on the West and have achieved economic resilience if not independence.

“For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth. This is creating an international system in which countries in all parts of the world are no longer objects or observers but players in their own right. It is the birth of a truly global order.”

The definitive statement of the book’s thesis, Zakaria clarifies here that a “post-American world” is not one in which the US does not matter; rather, there are too many important global players for any one state to define the system in its own image. So much of the modern age was characterized by Western powers imposing some level of domination upon the rest, and while that is not entirely an absent feature, a balance is finally beginning to reassert itself.

“A related aspect of this new era is the diffusion of power from states to other actors. The ‘rest’ that is rising includes many nonstate actors. Groups and individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are being undermined. Functions that were once controlled by governments are now shared with international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Nongovernmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue in every country […] In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.”

In addition to power shifting from the West to the non-West, Zakaria also finds that The Diffusion of Global Power involves power shifting away from the traditional nation-state.