Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World

Amazon.com Review **Book Description** This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else. So begins Fareed Zakarias important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling *The Future of Freedom*, 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 restthe growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many othersas 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 with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. * * * ** Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria: Author One-to-One** **Fareed Zakaria**: Your book is about two things, the climate crisis and also about an American crisis. Why do you link the two? **Thomas Friedman**: Youre absolutely right--it is about two things. The book says, America has a problem and the world has a problem. The worlds problem is that its getting hot, flat and crowded and that convergence--that perfect storm--is driving a lot of negative trends. Americas problem is that weve lost our way--weve lost our groove as a country. And the basic argument of the book is that we can solve our problem by taking the lead in solving the worlds problem. **Zakaria**: Explain what you mean by hot, flat and crowded. **Friedman**: There is a convergence of basically three large forces: one is global warming, which has been going on at a very slow pace since the industrial revolution; the second--what I call the flattening of the world--is a metaphor for the rise of middle-class citizens, from China to India to Brazil to Russia to Eastern Europe, who are beginning to consume like Americans. Thats a blessing in so many ways--its a blessing for global stability and for global growth. But it has enormous resource complications, if all these people--whom youve written about in your book, *The Post American World*--begin to consume like Americans. And lastly, global population growth simply refers to the steady growth of population in general, but at the same time the growth of more and more people able to live this middle-class lifestyle. Between now and 2020, the worlds going to add another billion people. And their resource demands--at every level--are going to be enormous. I tell the story in the book how, if we give each one of the next billion people on the planet just one sixty-watt incandescent light bulb, what it will mean: the answer is that it will require about 20 new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants. Thats so they can each turn on just one light bulb! **Zakaria**: In my book I talk about the rise of the rest and about the reality of how this rise of new powerful economic nations is completely changing the way the world works. Most everyones efforts have been devoted to Kyoto-like solutions, with the idea of getting western countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But I grew to realize that the West was a sideshow. India and China will build hundreds of coal-fire power plants in the next ten years and the combined carbon dioxide emissions of those new plants alone are five times larger than the savings mandated by the Kyoto accords. What do you do with the Indias and Chinas of the world? **Friedman**: I think there are two approaches. There has to be more understanding of the basic unfairness they feel. They feel like we sat down, had the hors doeuvres, ate the entre, pretty much finished off the dessert, invited them for tea and coffee and then said, Lets split the bill. So I understand the big sense of unfairness--they feel that now that they have a chance to grow and reach with large numbers a whole new standard of living, were basically telling them, Your growth, and all the emissions it would add, is threatening the worlds climate. At the same time, what I say to them--what I said to young Chinese most recently when I was just in China is this: Every time I come to China, young Chinese say to me, Mr. Friedman, your country grew dirty for 150 years. Now its our turn. And I say to them, Yes, youre absolutely right, its your turn. Grow as dirty as you want. Take your time. Because I think we probably just need about five years to invent all the new clean power technologies youre going to need as you choke to death, and were going to come and sell them to you. And were going to clean your clock in the next great global industry. So please, take your time. If you want to give us a five-year lead in the next great global industry, I will take five. If you want to give us ten, that would be even better. In other words, I know this is unfair, but I am here to tell you that in a world thats hot, flat and crowded, ET--energy technology--is going to be as big an industry as IT--information technology. Maybe even bigger. And who claims that industry--whose country and whose companies dominate that industry--I think is going to enjoy more national security, more economic security, more economic growth, a healthier population, and greater global respect, for that matter, as well. So you can sit back and say, its not fair that we have to compete in this new industry, that we should get to grow dirty for a while, or you can do what you did in telecommunications, and that is try to leap-frog us. And thats really what Im saying to them: this is a great economic opportunity. The game is still open. I want my country to win it--Im not sure it will. **Zakaria**: Im struck by the point you make about energy technology. In my book Im pretty optimistic about the United States. But the one area where Im worried is actually ET. We do fantastically in biotech, were doing fantastically in nanotechnology. But none of these new technologies have the kind of system-wide effect that information technology did. Energy does. If you want to find the next technological revolution you need to find an industry that transforms everything you do. Biotechnology affects one critical aspect of your day-to-day life, health, but not all of it. But energy--the consumption of energy--affects every human activity in the modern world. Now, my fear is that, of all the industries in the future, thats the one where were not ahead of the pack. Are we going to run second in this race? **Friedman**: Well, I want to ask you that, Fareed. Why do you think we havent led this industry, which itself has huge technological implications? We have all the secret sauce, all the technological prowess, to lead this industry. Why do you think this is the one area--and its enormous, its actually going to dwarf all the others--where we havent been at the real cutting edge? **Continue reading the Q&A between Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria** * * * From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but the rise of everyone else, readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as *Newsweek* editor and popular pundit Zakaria (*The Future of Freedom*) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading. We are living in a peaceful era, he maintains; world violence peaked around 1990 and has plummeted to a record low. Burgeoning prosperity has spread to the developing world, raising standards of living in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Twenty years ago China discarded Soviet economics but not its politics, leading to a wildly effective, top-down, scorched-earth boom. Its political antithesis, India, also prospers while remaining a chaotic, inefficient democracy, as Indian elected officials are (generally) loathe to use the brutally efficient tactics that are the staple of Chinese governance. Paradoxically, Indias greatest asset is its relative stability in the region; its officials take an unruly population for granted, while dissent produces paranoia in Chinese leaders. Zakaria predicts that despite its record of recent blunders at home and abroad, America will stay strong, buoyed by a stellar educational system and the influx of young immigrants, who give the U.S. a more youthful demographic than Europe and much of Asia whose workers support an increasing population of unproductive elderly. A lucid, thought-provoking appraisal of world affairs, this book will engage readers on both sides of the political spectrum. *(May)* Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.