By Yitzhak Noy
June 17,2010

Otto von Bismarck, the founder of modern Germany is considered to be the wisest of German politicians ever.  He also is deemed one of the most enlightened of all.  His command of the German language was as and still is incomparable. His sharp tongue worked well in Russian, French and English.  He also was able to foresee historical developments.

During the year in which he died, 1898, he was asked what the next century would be like.  The 84 year-old Iron Chancellor did not hesitate:  “The most important event in the 20th century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English.” He was right, of course.  From its outset, the 20th century was the century of North American English which defined the unprecedented successful power of the United States.

It also was the cornerstone of the union of English speaking peoples, as Churchill put it.  William II, the foolish Emperor of Germany who despised Bismarck and deposed him, pooh- poohed this union and paid with his crown. Adolf Hitler who ridiculed William II and the English language as spoken on the other side of the ocean, paid with his life. From the time that the United States became an empire, prophets of doom predicted its end, whether by decline or by a Judgment Day crash.

The theme that deals with the “decline of empires” is broad and since the 20th century there has been no power that escaped this prophetic analysis -   Austro-Hungary, Imperial China, the Soviet Union and others.

According to statistics, at least, it emerges that with regard to the decline of empires – some books are more exact than others.  Their authors are awarded admiration as if they were the prophets of our times.  But this is in retrospect and has no connection to the questions they raise in their books.  In other words, the degree of success of books of this kind is irrelevant for use as tools to predict the future inasmuch as their success is unpredictable (as is their failure).  The importance of a book becomes apparent only after the passage of time.

For example this applied to Francis Fukuyama’s book
 “The End of History.” It was published 20 years ago and scored a big success.  Today, it is clear that his prediction regarding the liberal democratic idea (to the extent that it would redefine the forms of government throughout the world) is naïve at best. It seems from this that the attempts to guess how Zakaria’s thesis will survive will be no less dangerous than the author’s assumption that his book adds another aspect to “the fall of giants.” There is no debate about its success in the present.  As soon as it was published in English two years ago, it lasted for many weeks at the top of the New York Times’ best sellers list.

There is nothing surprising about this and Zakaria is an exceptional phenomenon in the America world of mass communications.  A native of India’s city of Mumbai. He is the son of an aristocratic Muslim family who was afforded the best education that higher middle class families could provide their children in India. He arrived as a student in the United States, qualified for a BA degree from Yale University in Connecticut and when he was less than 30 years old, was awarded  PhD in political science from Harvard University

Now 44 years old, he lives in New York with American citizenship. He is married to an American woman and is the father of several children.   Zakaria is loyal to his adopted country, but considers himself a citizen of the world as well.

After serving  as an editor of “Foreign affairs,” of one of the most important periodicals in North America dealing with foreign policy, he became editor of Newsweek International  in October, 2009.

Endowed with sharp intelligence and writing ability he undoubtedly is aware of the irony of his being the first Moslem editor of one of the most important periodicals that appear in the West.  He was required to write an editorial and commentary with regard to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 a short time after taking up his then-new position.  That is not just a matter of flattery because in his book Zakaria deals extensively with the issue of terrorism which unfortunately is one of his books weakest links.

As an enlightened Muslim whose world outlook is liberal-conservative and who spent his youth in India, it could be assumed that would be equipped with an outlook broader than that of George Will or Charles Krauthammer when he deals with international Islamic terrorism, a blight that is trying  to cause a collision between the Third World and the First World.

Zakaria does not exploit his relative advantage when he describes the Islamic terrorist threat as a nuisance that does not threaten the West and whose strength has been declining since September 11, 2001, especially from the psychological aspect thanks to the Western media hysteria which he criticizes severely.  This is true, but there is great advantage to fundamentalist Islam in the hysteria of the American mass media which for these reasons projects every incident as a nightmare.   But the author tends to ignore the possibility that this terrorism could turn into nuclear terrorism with the direct or indirect help of countries whose international wisdom we can only partially understand.

We can expect especially from an intellectual like Zakaria that he would open a wider window for us to the machinations of countries like Pakistan or Iran and would not concentrate on China and India (each one is given a whole chapter in his book.)  Nor would he argue that their transfer from the Third World to the First World is so rapid that makes us dizzy and blurs our senses.  But these two countries are not the whole story.

In spite of all this, it must be emphasized that the book if a bold and captivating attempt to describe and anticipate our complex and troubled world’s future.  The book indeed belongs to the category of decline according to Zakaria’s thesis.  It is that the decline of the United States is a decline that can be detected only when it is juxtaposed against the resilience of countries like China and India.  The cultural foundations of these two giants rest upon a rationale that enables them to tolerate oriental religions.  This is like Christianity’s democratic mission which characterized its role in the West in the 19th century that of the United States in the 20th century.

Because of that, the decline of the United States contributed more to the pleasant slumber of a drug addict in one of the opium dens of Shanghai at the end of the 19th century when the hapless Chinese were trying to fight the gunboats of the West that were imposing the narcotic poison on them, i.e. the Boxer Rebellion in 1898 and 1901.

Contrary to the events before us the opium of the 21st century constitutes consumer goods from China to which the average Americans have become fully addicted – in exchange for the hopeless trade gap between China and America – a gap that has been pushing the United States to the edge of the historical stage.
It is not necessary to accept these words and it is enough if we remember the cultural revolution in China from 1966-1976.  It was imposed on the Chinese people by Mao tze tung   who already was partly senile and with the encouragement of Madame Mao his insane wife which pushed China backwards by more than a generation.  It was the centralized authoritarian regime whose rapid decision-making amazes Zakaria which definitely can create from within itself new madmen, who for lack of checks and balances – as is customary in the complex democracies - which may again bring the Chinese people to the edge of the abyss. What will happen then to the theories regarding the decline of the United States?

The book was written on the background of international events that took place between the years 2006-2007.  Between the appearance of the first edition and until the publication of the Hebrew translation which is before us there were two years in which among other things the term of President George W. Bush  (against whom Zakara does not spare his verbal rod) came to an end  and the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency - the same Obama who was an unknown lecturer in Illinois while the book was being written.
Obama is absent from the book. 

This and more: One of the central arguments here requires that the United States conduct itself with understanding and sensitivity towards the growing Third World without trying to impose upon it the values of Western democracy even if it wishes to reduce the animosity towards it. And here arises a president of the United States who is good for all the worlds: The African as well as the European and who is the great opposite of Bush.  His sensitivity towards the Third World does not seem to have any limits.  And even so the hostility towards the United States in “the other world” (Zakaria’s term) is steadily increasing.

It is important to emphasize the “Post-American World” is an engrossing book for curious readers who do not have to engage in soul-searching in order to cope with its complex economic issues and international interests.  It is full of current and precise material that relates constantly to the central historical events in the new era,  all of this in language that is clear and understandable to all.

Still from page to page the impression grows on the reader who is familiar with Zakaria’s excellent journalistic work that instead of providing us with a revolutionary thesis regarding the post-American era – something of the same dimension of the brilliant book by Samuel Huntington about the “clash of the civilizations” which is about the rise of radical Islam in the post-Cold War world (a book that was first published as an article in Foreign Affairs) we get a digest of Newsweek editorials as written by Zakaria during a decade, and  which he compiled with great talent in seven chapters.  This is a marvelous and enjoyable journalistic endeavor, a broad world-wide review that is comprehensive, enjoyable, and learned as well, but does not reach the level of a cohesive theory that would befit an able thinker.

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