The Future of American Power

How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest

Fareed Zakaria

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

Summary:  Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

FAREED ZAKARIA is Editor of Newsweek International. This essay is adapted from his book The Post-American World (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., © 2008 by Fareed Zakaria).

The world has been one in which the United States was utterly unrivaled for two decades. It has been, in a broader sense, a U.S.-designed world since the end of World War II. But it is now in the midst of one of history's greatest periods of change.

There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last 500 years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life -- its politics, economics, and culture. The first was the rise of the Western world, a process that began in the fifteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the late eighteenth century. It produced modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also produced the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West.

The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of the United States. Soon after it industrialized, the United States became the most powerful nation since imperial Rome, and the only one that was stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For most of the last century, the United States has dominated global economics, politics, science, culture, and ideas. For the last 20 years, that dominance has been unrivaled, a phenomenon unprecedented in history.

We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era -- the rise of the rest. Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. Although they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been vigorously forward. (This growth has been most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it, which is why to call this change "the rise of Asia" does not describe it accurately.)

The emerging international system is likely to be quite different from those that have preceded it. A hundred years ago, there was a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments, with constantly shifting alliances, rivalries, miscalculations, and wars. Then came the duopoly of the Cold War, more stable in some ways, but with the superpowers reacting and overreacting to each other's every move. Since 1991, we have lived under a U.S. imperium, a unique, unipolar world in which the open global economy has expanded and accelerated. This expansion is driving the next change in the nature of the international order. At the politico-military level, we remain in a single-superpower world. But polarity is not a binary phenomenon. The world will not stay unipolar for decades and then suddenly, one afternoon, become multipolar. On every dimension other than military power -- industrial, financial, social, cultural -- the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from U.S. dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.

There are many specific policies and programs one could advocate to make the United States' economy and society more competitive. But beyond all these what is also needed is a broader change in strategy and attitude. The United States must come to recognize that it faces a choice -- it can stabilize the emerging world order by bringing in the new rising nations, ceding some of its own power and perquisites, and accepting a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints. Or it can watch as the rise of the rest produces greater nationalism, diffusion, and disintegration, which will slowly tear apart the world order that the United States has built over the last 60 years. The case for the former is obvious. The world is changing, but it is going the United States' way. The rest that are rising are embracing markets, democratic government (of some form or another), and greater openness and transparency. It might be a world in which the United States takes up less space, but it is one in which American ideas and ideals are overwhelmingly dominant. The United States has a window of opportunity to shape and master the changing global landscape, but only if it first recognizes that the post-American world is a reality -- and embraces and celebrates that fact.