The Coming Post-American World?

Fareed Zakaria's got a new book out, The Post-American World.

I'm familiar with the book's thesis from two recent articles from Zakaria, "The Future of American Power," at Foreign Affairs, and "The Rise of the Rest," a book excerpt and this week's cover story at Newsweek."

I'll be picking up a copy of the book soon, but I can suggest now that Zakaria's got some tensions in his thesis, or at least in his presentation.

In terms of his thesis, as evidenced by the Foreign Affairs piece, Zakaria starts out with a lengthy section comparing the U.S. today to Great Britain's decline from imperial grandeur in the early-20th century. He then he elaborates a theory of how the United States' contemporary great power profile has changed, amid a hypothesized narrowing of the gap between American preponderance and our closest rivals in the international system.

Zakaria suggests that while international politics is now undergoing transformation, the U.S. is not in a traditional sense undergoing "relative decline"; that is, the key is not that the U.S. will be overtaken, but simply that the world around the U.S. has changed: The United States will remain the dominant country, but the international power gap will no longer be a gaping chasm, as was true through much of the post-World War II era, among those countries that were outside the bipolar order of U.S.-Soviet strategic competition.

Here's nice summary:

In trying to understand how the United States will fare in the new world, the first thing to do is simply look around: the future is already here. Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining breadth and depth. More countries are making goods, communications technology has been leveling the playing field, capital has been free to move across the world -- and the United States has benefited massively from these trends. Its economy has received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, and its companies have entered new countries and industries with great success. Despite two decades of a very expensive dollar, U.S. exports have held ground, and the World Economic Forum currently ranks the United States as the world's most competitive economy. GDP growth, the bottom line, has averaged just over three percent in the United States for 25 years, significantly higher than in Europe or Japan. Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, a full percentage point higher than the European average. This superior growth trajectory might be petering out, and perhaps U.S. growth will be more typical for an advanced industrialized country for the next few years. But the general point -- that the United States is a highly dynamic economy at the cutting edge, despite its enormous size - holds.

In Zakaria's piece - especially in his comparison to Britain's fall from hegemonic status - I'm finding a striking resemblance to Joseph Nye's work, especially Nye's 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (which was a rebuttal to Paul Kenney's Rise and Fall of the Great Power, 1987).

Nye's research - coming at a time of significant debate on American decline - turned out to be very accurate in its analysis of the enduring nature of American power, for example, where he suggests the differences in capabilities between Britain and the United States:

As we will see ... none of the other major world powers is now overtaking the United States in military and and economic power. Although Western Europe has the skilled population, the GNP, and the improved Common Market coming in 1992, few observers believe that European integration will progress soon to a single government or single security policy. Similarly, China may become a potential rival of the United States over a much longer term, but China's human and technological infrastructure is much less developed than that of the United States or even the Soviet Union. And while many Americans believe that Japan's economic strength is a greater challenge than Soviet military power, economic competition is not a zero-sum game where one country's gain is its competitors loss. Thus, far, Japan has chosen the strategy of a trading state rather than that of a military power. There is no current analogue to the Kaiser's Germany.

With the exception of Nye's allusion to a durable Soviet power profile, the remainder of the passage is fairly prescient. China's probably now the key competitor to the U.S., after the decline of Russia in the 1990s. But other than that, the durability of American preponderance is key.

Nye also elaborated his theory of "soft power" in the 1990s, and one of his key conceptions was of power as a layer cake, with U.S. unipolar hegemony on top, a middle level of economic interdependence among the world's advanced industrialized democracies, and a bottom layer of increasing transnational globalization among the other remaining state and non-state actors of the world.

Compare this to Zakaria's notion of the "post-American world," in his Newsweek article:

We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

So, we're not really declining, because at "the military and political level" the international system will remian unipolar. But in every other dimension, America faces a "a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now..."

With all due respect to Zakaria, this seems all too familiar - it's deja vu, a relative decline thesis for the post-G.W. Bush world. It is, in a sense. a new world order for the post-America unbound, post-neocon era.

I like it, in any case. Simply because of Zakaria's optimism.

There have been some recent arguments suggesting a return of American relative decline.

Some assert a systemic challenger in the rise of Chinese power, or imperial overstretch in America's prolonged conflict in Iraq, for example, respectively, in G. John Ikenberry's, "The Rise of China and the Future of the West," and in a representative piece last year at National Journal, arguing the Bush administration's foreign policy's precipitated the "end of the American era."

I've rebutted some of these points previously, for example, in my entry, "China, International Institutions, and Power Transitions."

I would just add that Zakaria's work looks to be the most important statement on the enduring nature of American power this decade.

His research though, appears to be mostly an update of 1990s-era works - focusing on new actors, trends, and technologies - making the case for the likelihood of continued American preeminance in international life.

That's why I suggest Zakaria's got some presentation problems: We're not at the end of the Pax Americana, although the Newsweek article's subheadings suggest it.

We're also not genuinely in a "post-American" world, for while we are seeing the "rise of the rest," the traditional bases of American global preponderance remain intact - other key actors are just not so far behind.

We'll see more economic, cultural, and technological diversity on the world stage, but it's not likely that a new great power will supplant the United States soon, at least in the traditional conception of international power transitions.