The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [28]
The 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Survey showed a remarkable increase worldwide in positive views about free trade, markets, and democracy. Large majorities in countries from China and Germany to Bangladesh and Nigeria said that growing trade ties between countries were good. Of the forty-seven countries polled, however, the one that came in dead last in terms of support for free trade was the United States. In the seven years the survey has been done, no country has seen as great a drop-off as the United States.
Or take a look at the attitudes toward foreign companies. When asked whether they had a positive impact, a surprisingly large number of people in countries like Brazil, Nigeria, India, and Bangladesh said yes. Those countries have typically been suspicious of Western multinationals. (South Asia’s unease has some basis; after all, it was initially colonized by a multinational corporation, the British East India Company.) And yet, 73 percent in India, 75 percent in Bangladesh, 70 percent in Brazil, and 82 percent in Nigeria now have positive views of these companies. The figure for America, in contrast, is 45 percent, which places us in the bottom five. We want the world to accept American companies with open arms, but when they come here—that’s a different matter. Attitudes on immigration represent an even larger reversal. On an issue where the United States has been the model for the world, the country has regressed toward an angry defensive crouch. Where we once wanted to pioneer every new technology, we now look at innovation fearfully, wondering how it will change things.
The irony is that the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions. For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism. But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated—free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission—it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.
3
A Non-Western World?
In 1492, as everybody knows, Christopher Columbus set sail on one of the most ambitious expeditions in human history. What is less well known is that eighty-seven years earlier a Chinese admiral named Zheng He began the first of seven equally ambitious expeditions. Zheng’s ships were much bigger and better constructed than those of Columbus, or Vasco da Gama, or any of Europe’s other great fifteenth- and sixteenth-century seafarers. On his first trip, in 1405, he took 317 vessels and 28,000 men, compared with Columbus’