The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [3]
The new edition incorporates my views on the financial crisis and its effects, the challenges and opportunities for the American economy, and the nature of the new global geopolitics. They are worked in throughout the book, not in any one place. Nowhere have I altered my basic views, so a reader who thought I was wrong three years ago is unlikely to be persuaded that I am now right. I felt that it was important to preserve the basic integrity of the work. I still believe that the challenge for all of us in the twenty-first century will be to live and prosper in this new and very different world.
1
The Rise of the Rest
This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else. It is about the great transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, though often discussed, remains poorly understood. This is natural. Changes, even sea changes, take place gradually. Though we talk about a new era, the world seems to be one with which we are familiar. But in fact, it is very different.
There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life—its politics, economics, and culture. The first was the rise of the Western world, a process that began in the fifteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the late eighteenth century. It produced modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also produced the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West.
The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of the United States. Soon after it industrialized, the United States became the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For most of the last century, the United States has dominated global economics, politics, science, and culture. For the last twenty years, that dominance has been unrivaled, a phenomenon unprecedented in modern history.
We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called “the rise of the rest.” Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. While they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Even the economic rupture of 2008 and 2009 could not halt or reverse this trend; in fact, the recession accelerated it. While many of the world’s wealthy, industrialized economies continued to struggle with slow growth, high unemployment, and overwhelming indebtedness through 2010 and beyond, the countries that constitute “the rest” rebounded quickly. India’s annual growth rate slowed to 5.7 percent in 2009, but hummed along at a 9.7 percent rate in 2010. China’s GDP growth never fell below 9 percent.
This economic success was once most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it. That is why to call this shift “the rise of Asia” does not describe it accurately. In 2010, 85 countries grew at a rate of 4 percent or more. In 2006 and 2007, that number was 125. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa, two-thirds of the continent. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term “emerging markets,” has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world’s next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India; two from China; and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.
Look around. The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, Hong Kong now rivals London and New York as the leading