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The TPM Cafe Book Club on Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World is interesting, but I recommend reading the excerpt published in Newsweek for a fuller precis of the book's ideas. In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. Moreover, this is not a speculative prediction. It is already happening. The EU is a bigger economy than we are. The largest publicly-traded company in the world is in Beijing. The largest refinery in being constructed in India. Hell, we don't even have the biggest mall anymore -- The Mall of America doesn't even make the Top Ten. We're still the unquestioned military leader, but in an age of intercontinental nuclear weapons, that gives us very little power over other large countries. We're not invading anyone who can shoot back.The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. We can be, by turns, belligerent and aggressive to our potential competitors. We can force diplomatic flare-ups and risk violent confrontations. We can encourage mistrust and anger. We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences. Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents. As for relations between the powers themselves,the more invested these countries are in the global system, the more they feel its benefits flowing to them and their people, the less likely they are to jeopardize its security or seek violent competition with other countries. Indeed, looked at from this perspective, little could be better than the rise of other, powerful countries with their own highly educated populaces and increasingly symmetrical incentives. Looked at from the unipolarist's perspective, however, little could be worse -- and few prophecies could be more obviously self-fulfilling. The choice between the two visions is, of course, for us to make. Zakaria's book is argument in favor of the positive sum approach is deeply convincing, and an entry into what's probably the most important debate going today.