If it is too early to say with precision what its foreign policy will be, Obama has already changed the American discourse on the international arena. Fareed Zakaria’s latest book is part of this trend and describes a world where the United States will have to share its power more, without completely losing their leadership.
“” This is not a book about the Decline of America But Rather About the Rise of Everyone Else ». This is how the latest book by Fareed Zakaria, an American journalist born in India, begins for Newsweek magazine and whose writings seem to have inspired Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Read The post-american world A few months after Obama’s victory gave some keys to understanding the first opening gestures of the new American administration, in particular towards the Muslim world.
Zakaria draws in his work the main lines of what American foreign policy could be after Bush, called to go beyond the rhetoric of the axes of good and evil. And sweeps, in passing, the idea of a world which would today be more dangerous than yesterday, especially for the United States. Muslim fundamentalism is thus brought back to its fair proportions, that is to say a geopolitical phenomenon of much less magnitude that formerly European totalitarianisms or the Cold War. The post-american world is in a way the geopolitical counterpart of Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is flatwhich illustrated more than it theorizes the emergence of an increasingly interdependent, integrated, flat world. Here, Zakaria seems to resume the thesis developed by Francis Fukuyama from an irreversible movement of societies towards forms of liberal market democracy (The End of History and the Last Man1992), surprisingly citing Margaret Thatcher and his famous “ There is no alternative ». In a world where the economic powers of states will tend to balance, American diplomacy will be forced to set its speech to maintain its credibility. Thus, it will become more and more difficult, according to Zakaria, to continue criticizing China for its action in Sudan without being returned to the figure American support to Saudi Arabia, Taiwan or even Pakistan.
In other words, the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, of India and Brazil, even the return of Russia forces hyperpower unless Manicheism. Long passages from the book are devoted to the Chinese challenge, which Zakaria predicts that it will be as serious in the future, and even more sustainable as formerly the Soviet challenge, vitiated by the absence of a coherent economic model and sufficient social vitality to hold in the long term against American dynamism. While relativizing the scope of culturalist theories, Zakaria nevertheless sees in the absence of universalist and proselyte claims in the “ religion And Buddhist practice a kind of guarantee against aggressive Chinese imperialism.
As for India, Zakaria recalls that if it houses several Silicon Valleysit also hosts three Nigeria, which limits its power to weigh internationally. Her GDP is only a third of that of China and the country remains politically divided. Even if India would like, it would be able to worry America ? Not necessarily: India is the country whose inhabitants have the best opinion of the United States (according to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey) and his diplomacy remains marked by the principle attributed to the Mahatma Gandhi: “ Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and the world will soon be blind and toothless ». Zakaria also dismisses the possibility of a significant rise in Muslim fundamentalism in India, recalling that none of the 150 million Indian Muslims had so far participated in an attack claimed by Al-Qaida.
Should we then believe in the possibility of a decline in the American Empire ? Zakaria tries, but comparison is not right, to learn some lessons from the slow British withdrawal of world affairs from the end of the XIXe century. That said, the author quickly and wisely taken his distance from this parallel quickly and quite wisely, recalling for example that if the Boers war had largely contributed to exposing the weakness of the British army, then the First World War to ruin the finances of the country, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq never cost only 1% of GDP per year, less than the Vietnam War in its time (1.6% of the GDP). The United States today retains such economic, technological, scientific (housing on its soil between 40 and 60 of the best universities in the world, according to the classification) and military that it would be absurd to imagine a post-American world without the United States.
So you have to think a world with The United States, but not with the United States alone as is the case since the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the era of unipolarity is coming to an end, the United States must quickly make opening gestures to prepare a world as close as possible to their values and interests, taking advantage of a power relationship that is (still) very favorable to them, rather than waiting for the balancing that will eventually win.
Zakaria considers it useful to rebuild around the United States a sense of movement, progress and the collective and, in this state of mind, to try to limit the tensions caused by American power. It would be necessary for example to adopt a more nuanced approach to the Muslim world, by distinguishing more systematically the radicals of the moderates, starting from the principle that it is necessary to divide to reign and, in any event, to avoid unifying against oneself as the Bush administration had done. This is one of the key readings of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, with his call for a new approach, based on interest and mutual respect, but also of his choice to grant from the start of his mandate a substantial interview to the Al-Arabiya chain or to send some signs of appeasement towards Iran. In this diplomacy less carried by ideology, Zakaria’s multilateralism is “ à la carte », With the United States sometimes in the role of leader, sometimes more behind.
Finally, the question of the use of soft poweraccording to the concept resulting from the title of Joseph Nye’s work, is also posed, in two different ways. The first to call “ think asymmetry “, As part of the conflicts where the adversary does not use conventional armed force but other types of strategies (like Iraqi militias or Hezbollah against Israel in 2006). The United States must reinvent its strategic thinking and develop other intervention methods, adapted to the context specific to each situation, from diplomacy to intelligence through commercial or financial deterrent. The use of force in recent years is indeed, first of all, a defeat of thought. The second challenge is to rebuild the image of the United States in the world, so that its positions are no longer disqualified.
In short, we will not remember from the book of Fareed Zakaria of particularly revolutionary ideas in terms of diplomacy or management of international affairs. Rather a moderation which, in recent years, has often been lacking. We can, of course, wonder about the validity of the thesis of the universal dissemination of liberal democracy, as we have since the fall of the wall, moreover, or the relevance of the analyzes presented here of the crisis, which questions the resilience of the American economy, but the essential is not there. The tone of American speech has already changed, and it is not negligible. What to hope for ? Probably a appeasement of relations between the United States and various Muslim countries (Iran, Syria) and their streets, which authorizes reasonable optimism as to the evolution of the situation in the Near and the Middle East. It will certainly take time to mitigate the tensions born of the wanderings of recent years, but this progress is notable enough to be reported. It would obviously be completely disproportionate to attribute its fatherhood to this book, but we will nevertheless see one of the symbols and one of the products of this new America.