The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria

Released August 2008. 8.5 hours on CD.

After reading some about the challenge America faces in maintaining its status as the world's cultural, economic and military superpower from larger and more populous states like Russia, India and China in the next century, this book seemed to be the perfect way to deepen my knowledge of the subject. Fareed Zakaria writes a regular column in Newsweek on international affairs, and I find his writing to be clear and comprehensible on these heady subjects. Click below for more on a thoughtful, left of center view (Fareed's, not mine) of the next 100 years for America:

Zakaria came to the US from his native India at the age of 18 for college, and his immigrant experience shapes his views on our country. His major theme is that America is the greatest country in the world and can stay that way if we look to history for examples of how to maintain our hegemony. The book starts with historic discussions of our major challenger, China, and discusses its desire to quietly rise as a power. This is an interesting chapter that deepened my understanding of China's strategy. They are able to move faster than the Western nations because of their Communism, but that is precisely what is hampering their true ascension. If the power of their billions of people were harnessed in a free society, the US would truly be met with a challenge. Zakaria reminds the reader that the Chinese think of everything in the collective sense, not the individual sense, and they raise prodigious test takers, but not necessarily thinkers. The advantages the US has are our free press, open government, entrepreneurism and individuality. He says in his book that the Chinese can score better on the tests, but don't know how to think critically or creatively to solve problems the way Americans do.

He only touches briefly on Russia, but acknowledges their challenge in the coming years. India gets lots of time, and his bias for his native country comes through occasionally. He argues that India is best positioned to move onto the global superpower stage because of their historic familiarity with Western culture and language (thanks British Empire!) and their democratic form of government. Among foreign nations, Indians view the US most favorably. The problem India faces is its staggering poor and terrible infrastructure. Most of India is a third world country and it will take untold trillions to bring its masses up from a life of subsistence.

The fall of the British Empire around the turn of the 20th Century is told as a cautionary tale for the US - although Zakaria finds several distinguishing factors that bode well for the US. On the negative side, he analogizes the Boer Wars (which stretched the empire's military thin and eroded the world's respect for the empire) to the Iraq war. He cites our massive GDP and military spending as reasons for our continued success and tells of many ways we can leverage our position to continue dominance.

The final chapters are basically a long wet kiss for Barack Obama, as he argues for a US foreign policy that does much more pandering to the rest of the world and tries to restore our polling numbers among foreign nations. This does make some sense on one level, but he goes to far in this focus on other nations. While I think a little more nuance and couth than Bush has displayed is certainly called for, I also think that the NY Times, etc, has cast an unfavorable view of Bush that the other countries have been eager to latch onto.

All in all, this was a very interesting and compact book, and is worth your 8.5 hours, and it is much better than Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. This book foucses more on history and political science whereas Friedman is overly enamored with technology and cute phrases and bits.