Book review of The Post-American World

Overview
It is always interesting and for me, a Chinese, to read this kind of book which talks about how the world has been changed by “the rise of the rest” (China, India, etc).
In his book, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions from his view in the book.
At the beginning of the book, Zakaria uses the context of world history to support his idea, He demonstrate that in the last five hundred years, the strengths and shortcomings of past superpowers and how they came to be superpowers. Then Zakaria switch to a point that power is shifting from the United States (and the West in general) to be distributed across a plethora of developing countries, including China, India, Brazil, Russia as well as various non-governmental organizations. Zakaria believes that China and India are quickly becoming major global players. China’s economy is growing at an astronomical rate, mainly due to the Communist government that has the ability to make policies quickly and implement them even faster. However, in the long run, politics and society may hold China back for several years before it has the ability to outrun the United States in the global race.
In this part, Zakaria poses an interesting theory. He says that the rise of “the rest” is largely due to the fact that America for the past decades has gone around the world, touting the benefits of its own methods and ideologies like capitalism and democracy. But, now that it has finally succeeded in globalizing the world with its ideas, it has “forgotten to globalize itself” and is increasingly suspicious of the success of other countries.
What I noticed is that Zakaria uses an example that the same trend in China in the early centuries of the millennium, which closed its doors to the outside world’s thoughts and innovations, dooming itself to fall behind the West in later centuries to explain the situation to America’s current behavior of egocentrism.
After that He continues to explain that many of the United States’ problems can be attributed to ignorance of the rise of countries like China and India, mainly by the government’s ignorance. He encourages U.S. policy makers to recognize these changes and then learn to compromise with other nations to overcome its’ own shear greatness of power.
In the last part of his book, Zakaria focuses on how the USA should use its power. He gives the point that U.S. must adapt its seemingly imperialistic mindset to one of integration and collaboration with other rising nations, including China and India. He even provides six general guidelines on how American power should be used in the new world, this post-American world.

Strengths
The “rise of the rest” is a very hot topic in the USA; this book is very relevant and very practical.
In my opinion, a great part of The Post-American World is that it is easy to read.
All these examples have sufficient detail and supporting documentation to make examples credible and informative, and therefore, the reader needs little knowledge of history to understand Zakaria’s arguments.
Zakaria’s style and approach to presenting his ideas are vivid. This is most likely due to his background and profession as a journalist in which his purpose is to appeal to the general public.
Another great part of this book is that in most of the books, when writer mentioned the economic examples, they are always only hard numbers, but in this book Zakaria does not neglect anthropological factors like culture, religion, and worldview. He provides a good overview of historical analogs in his analysis with all these factors.
For example, he use “close doors” example which happened in China and links it to the situation to America’s current behavior of egocentrism. For readers, it is much easier to get the writer’s idea.

Weakness
Though this book has a lot of significant strengths, it may have some bias.
From the writer’s political positions, at the first place, he labeled China as the hostile forces, just because of communism. I know this is the mainstream idea of the west world, but when economics is affected by the politics at the same time politics are affected by economics too. And I haven’t seen any analysis in this book.
Another weakness is that at the last part of the book, Zakaria provides “six simple guidelines”. Maybe because it is in the final chapter, I think there is not enough discussion about this part, “six simple guidelines” could be the whole conclusion of the book, I think Zakaria should really focus on it.

Final Thoughts
I think “The Post-American World” is a great book, it give a very vivid picture of what the United States and the west has to expect in the upcoming decades, particularly when dealing with China and India.
In fact, we can see the whole idea from the first sentence of the book, “This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else”.
As a foreign student in the USA, the topics about international relations have always been very interesting to me. Zakaria is Bombay-born immigrant, so maybe sometime his tone will make me a little uncomfortable for me, but his idea has a lot of shining places.
I am a big fan of Chinese and Indian history, so most of the examples in this book are very familiar for me. It is the first time that I read history in terms of power-shifts which is written by a foreign. I can see different thoughts form the same history because of different worldviews.
Back to the book itself, this book is very relevant and very practical for the USA now.
Again, for example, from the “close door” example in China (this example really impress me), this book can give more thinking for Americans about how they should do in the similar situation. I think it will be a strategy that is open to and willing to borrow ideas from other countries and It will also be a strategy that acknowledges the “rise of the rest” and their contributions to the global community.
Sometimes, in the USA, I feel Americans are making some mistakes we used to make, I am glad to see that Zakaria see that too.

BY Yuxiang Gao