After America

Kal Cobalt

"We are living through the third great power shift in modern history," writes Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria. "At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension––industrial, financial, social, cultural––the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance."

In his new book, The Post-American World, Zakaria argues that the loss of dominance is not the loss of relevance or prosperity. "The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else."

Along the way, Zakaria makes surprising observations about the state of the world, noting the massive distortions of the media that have twisted the "series of positive trends that have been progressing over the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate of unprecedented peace and prosperity." Hard to swallow? "Looking at the evidence, " Zakaria says, "Harvard's polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are probably living 'in the most peaceful time of our species' existence.'"

Image by T Hall under Creative Commons license.