The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [111]
This new role is quite different from the traditional superpower role. It involves consultation, cooperation, and even compromise. It derives its power by setting the agenda, defining the issues, and mobilizing coalitions. It is not a top-down hierarchy in which the United States makes its decisions and then informs a grateful (or silent) world. But it is a crucial role because, in a world with many players, setting the agenda and organizing coalitions become primary forms of power. The chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a very powerful person.
Those who have figured out how best to thrive in a post-American world are America’s great multinationals. They are conquering new markets by changing their old ways. Take General Electric, which in the past didn’t believe in joint ventures abroad. It wanted to own 100 percent of every foreign involvement it had. In recent years, however, as it has watched the growing skill and confidence of the local firms in emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, GE has come to realize that such a strategy would keep it locked out of the fastest-growing parts of the world. So it changed its approach. GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt sums it up: “Sure, we could keep buying small companies and G.E.-ize them. But we’ve learned that it’s better to partner with the No. 3 company that wants to be No. 1 than to buy a tiny company or go it alone.” The New York Times called it a turn away from “managerial imperialism,” which had become a “luxury G.E. could no longer afford.”9 Washington, which faces no market test, has not yet figured out that diplomatic imperialism is a luxury that the United States can no longer afford.
There is still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for it. “No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream to which people aspire,” explained Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar. A former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has argued that what the world really wants from America is not that it offer a concession on trade here and there but that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.10 America’s soft power, in this sense, is intricately linked to its hard power. But it is the combination of the two that give it a unique role in world affairs.
To describe more concretely what operating in this new world would look like, I have set out six simple guidelines.
1. Choose. American omnipotence has made Washington believe that it is exempt from the need to have priorities. It wants to have it all. It is crucial that the United States be more disciplined about this. President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, argues properly for a rebalancing of American foreign policy, away from the obsessive attention to the hot spots and failed states in the wider Middle East and toward the new centers of global power in Asia.
While making this strategic shift, Washington will also need to make a shift in its ongoing approach to international problems, in which all too often it balks at making any choices—because they suggest compromise. On North Korea and Iran, for example, the Bush administration could not decide whether it wanted regime change or policy change (that is, denuclearization). The two work at cross-purposes. If you threaten a country with regime change, it only makes more urgent that government’s desire for nuclear weapons, which is an insurance policy in the world of international politics.
Consider what the world looks like to Iran. It is surrounded by nuclear powers (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel), and across two of its borders sit tens of thousands of U.S. troops (in Iraq and Afghanistan). President Bush repeatedly made