Beyond the Post-American World

In this month’s issue of Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria comments on what he calls “A Post-American World in Progress.”  Zakaria observes that none of the world’s rising powers, including the rapidly growing BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have been able to shape international events because of their own domestic struggles.  He also remarks that the United States is no longer able to step in to influence regional or global currents due to its decline in relative world dominance.

Zakaria’s new article is an extension of the argument he made in his 2008 book, The Post-American World. In that book, he asserted that the United States was moving from world political and economic dominance, toward being an important part of a multi-polar world.  He maintained that this post-American future would probably not be a matter of the decline of the U.S., in an absolute sense, but of “the rise of the rest,” a pun  on William McNeill’s classic work of world history, The Rise of the West (1963). Zakaria traced the ascendance of new parts of the world to the spread of market economics, particularly during the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The financial force that has powered the new [post-American] era,” Zakaria writes, “is the free movement of capital” (Zakaria 2008: 3). The movement of capital is intimately linked to the flow of goods and services and, more to the point here, to the movement of people. In order to continue to be a major part of this increasingly multi-polar world, according to Zakaria, the United States needed to “globalize itself,” to become part of an economic and political network of nations.

Both in the book and in the new article, Zakaria may overestimate the extent to which the world was American even in the post-World War II pinnacle of U.S. influence. Plenty of nations did not do what we wanted them to do even in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as countries did align themselves with us or at least give lip service to following an American lead, this was largely due to the great competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the latter dominated a big part of the globe. Indeed, I think one could plausibly argue that the single greatest international achievement of the United States in its period of greatest absolute international sway was spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.

The American effort to dominate world events did contribute to re-shaping our domestic political scene.  Within the United States, political power and activity in the years following World War II became decidedly less “multi-polar” as Washington, D.C. pulled control toward the national center, away from local and state governments.  The “American” role in world events was really a federal government role in both international and domestic affairs.

Perhaps in many ways the United States needs not to “globalize” itself but to “localize” itself, to allow a “rise of the rest” inside the U.S., as communities look to their own affairs. Internationally, rather than seeing the domestic challenges of other nations as impediments to their direction of regional or global events, we should see their concentration on their own internal issues as paying attention to their proper business.  The less China or Russia meddles in the lives of people in other countries, the better.