A decadencia auto-induzida do imperio americano - Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs)

The Self-Destruction of American Power

Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment

Fareed Zakaria

Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet. Remember that the phrase “Third World” derived from the tripartite division of the globe, the First World being the United States and Western Europe, and the Second World, the communist countries. The Third World was everywhere else, where each country was choosing between U.S. and Soviet influence. For much of the world’s population, from Poland to China, the century hardly looked American.

The United States’ post–Cold War supremacy was initially hard to detect. As I pointed out in The New Yorker in 2002, most participants missed it. In 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that the world was dividing into three political spheres, dominated by the dollar, the yen, and the deutsche mark. Henry Kissinger’s 1994 book, Diplomacy, predicted the dawn of a new multipolar age. Certainly in the United States, there was little triumphalism. The 1992 presidential campaign was marked by a sense of weakness and weariness. “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won,” the Democratic hopeful Paul Tsongas said again and again. Asia hands had already begun to speak of “the Pacific century.”

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire.

There was one exception to this analysis, a prescient essay in the pages of this magazine by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The Unipolar Moment,” which was published in 1990. But even this triumphalist take was limited in its expansiveness, as its title suggests. “The unipolar moment will be brief,” Krauthammer admitted, predicting in a Washington Post column that within a very short time, Germany and Japan, the two emerging “regional superpowers,” would be pursuing foreign policies independent of the United States.

Policymakers welcomed the waning of unipolarity, which they assumed was imminent. In 1991, as the Balkan wars began, Jacques Poos, the president of the Council of the European Union, declared, “This is the hour of Europe.” He explained: “If one problem can be solved by Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans.” But it turned out that only the United States had the combined power and influence to intervene effectively and tackle the crisis.

Similarly, toward the end of the 1990s, when a series of economic panics sent East Asian economies into tailspins, only the United States could stabilize the global financial system. It organized a $120 billion international bailout for the worst-hit countries, resolving the crisis. Time magazine put three Americans, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, on its cover with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Just as American hegemony grew in the early 1990s while no one was noticing, so in the late 1990s did the forces that would undermine it, even as people had begun to speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation” and “the world’s sole superpower.” First and foremost, there was the rise of China. It is easy to see in retrospect that Beijing would become the only serious rival to Washington, but it was not as apparent a quarter century ago. Although China had grown speedily since the 1980s, it had done so from a very low base. Few countries had been able to continue that process for more than a couple of decades. China’s strange mixture of capitalism and Leninism seemed fragile, as the Tiananmen Square uprising had revealed.

But China’s rise persisted, and the country became the new great power on the block, one with the might and the ambition to match the United States. Russia, for its part, went from being both weak and quiescent in the early 1990s to being a revanchist power, a spoiler with enough capability and cunning to be disruptive. With two major global players outside the U.S.-constructed international system, the world had entered a post-American phase. Today, the United States is still the most powerful country on the planet, but it exists in a world of global and regional powers that can—and frequently do—push back.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of Islamic terrorism played a dual role in the decline of U.S. hegemony. At first, the attacks seemed to galvanize Washington and mobilize its power. In 2001, the United States, still larger economically than the next five countries put together, chose to ramp up its annual defense spending by an amount—almost $50 billion—that was larger than the United Kingdom’s entire yearly defense budget. When Washington intervened in Afghanistan, it was able to get overwhelming support for the campaign, including from Russia. Two years later, despite many objections, it was still able to put together a large international coalition for an invasion of Iraq. The early years of this century marked the high point of the American imperium, as Washington tried to remake wholly alien nations—Afghanistan and Iraq—thousands of miles away, despite the rest of the world’s reluctant acquiescence or active opposition.

Iraq in particular marked a turning point. The United States embarked on a war of choice despite misgivings expressed in the rest of world. It tried to get the UN to rubber-stamp its mission, and when that proved arduous, it dispensed with the organization altogether. It ignored the Powell Doctrine—the idea, promulgated by General Colin Powell while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, that a war was worth entering only if vital national interests were at stake and overwhelming victory assured. The Bush administration insisted that the vast challenge of occupying Iraq could be undertaken with a small number of troops and a light touch. Iraq, it was said, would pay for itself. And once in Baghdad, Washington decided to destroy the Iraqi state, disbanding the army and purging the bureaucracy, which produced chaos and helped fuel an insurgency. Any one of these mistakes might have been overcome. But together they ensured that Iraq became a costly fiasco.

After 9/11, Washington made major, consequential decisions that continue to haunt it, but it made all of them hastily and in fear. It saw itself as in mortal danger, needing to do whatever it took to defend itself—from invading Iraq to spending untold sums on homeland security to employing torture. The rest of the world saw a country that was experiencing a kind of terrorism that many had lived with for years and yet was thrashing around like a wounded lion, tearing down international alliances and norms. In its first two years, the George W. Bush administration walked away from more international agreements than any previous administration had. (Undoubtedly, that record has now been surpassed under President Donald Trump.) American behavior abroad during the Bush administration shattered the moral and political authority of the United States, as long-standing allies such as Canada and France found themselves at odds with it on the substance, morality, and style of its foreign policy.

OWN GOAL

So which was it that eroded American hegemony—the rise of new challengers or imperial overreach? As with any large and complex historical phenomenon, it was probably all of the above. China’s rise was one of those tectonic shifts in international life that would have eroded any hegemon’s unrivaled power, no matter how skillful its diplomacy. The return of Russia, however, was a more complex affair. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 1990s, leaders in Moscow were determined to turn their country into a liberal democracy, a European nation, and an ally of sorts of the West. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister during the final years of the Soviet Union, supported the United States’ 1990–91 war against Iraq. And after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was an even more ardent liberal, an internationalist, and a vigorous supporter of human rights.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment was to simply stop paying attention.

Who lost Russia is a question for another article. But it is worth noting that although Washington gave Moscow some status and respect—expanding the G-7 into the G-8, for example—it never truly took Russia’s security concerns seriously. It enlarged NATO fast and furiously, a process that might have been necessary for countries such as Poland, historically insecure and threatened by Russia, but one that has continued on unthinkingly, with little concern for Russian sensitivities, and now even extends to Macedonia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior makes every action taken against his country seem justified, but it’s worth asking, What forces produced the rise of Putin and his foreign policy in the first place? Undoubtedly, they were mostly internal to Russia, but to the extent that U.S. actions had an effect, they appear to have been damaging, helping stoke the forces of revenge and revanchism in Russia.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment, with Russia and more generally, was to simply stop paying attention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to go home, and they did. During the Cold War, the United States had stayed deeply interested in events in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait, and even Angola and Namibia. By the mid-1990s, it had lost all interest in the world. Foreign-bureau broadcasts by NBC fell from 1,013 minutes in 1988 to 327 minutes in 1996. (Today, the three main networks combined devote roughly the same amount of time to foreign-bureau stories as each individual network did in 1988.) Both the White House and Congress during the George H. W. Bush administration had no appetite for an ambitious effort to transform Russia, no interest in rolling out a new version of the Marshall Plan or becoming deeply engaged in the country. Even amid the foreign economic crises that hit during the Clinton administration, U.S. policymakers had to scramble and improvise, knowing that Congress would appropriate no funds to rescue Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia. They offered advice, most of it designed to require little assistance from Washington, but their attitude was one of a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.

Shamil Zhumatov / REUTERS

Unmarked Russian soldiers near Sevastopol, Crimea, March 2014

Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm, limited in its scope, endorsed by major powers and legitimized by international law. But right at the time of all these positive developments, the United States lost interest. U.S. policymakers still wanted to transform the world in the 1990s, but on the cheap. They did not have the political capital or resources to throw themselves into the effort. That was one reason Washington’s advice to foreign countries was always the same: economic shock therapy and instant democracy. Anything slower or more complex—anything, in other words, that resembled the manner in which the West itself had liberalized its economy and democratized its politics—was unacceptable. Before 9/11, when confronting challenges, the American tactic was mostly to attack from afar, hence the twin approaches of economic sanctions and precision air strikes. Both of these, as the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote of airpower, had the characteristics of modern courtship: “gratification without commitment.”

Of course, these limits on the United States’ willingness to pay prices and bear burdens never changed its rhetoric, which is why, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, I pointed out that U.S. foreign policy was defined by “the rhetoric of transformation but the reality of accommodation.” The result, I said, was “a hollow hegemony.” That hollowness has persisted ever since.

THE FINAL BLOW

The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat). And it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions—such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea—what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.

Intelectuais publicos: debate no Olimpo (Fareed Zakaria; Niall Ferguson)

Intellectual power and responsibility in an age of superstars

Daniel W. Drezner

Foreign Policy, August 23, 2012

In the last few weeks, Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson have found themselves at the centers of controversy. As someone who has written a thing or two about public intellectuals, I confess to finding it all very fascinating. What's striking to me is the vehemence on all sides.  Brad DeLong is an excitable sort, but calling for Harvard to fire Niall Ferguson for tendentious matters unrelated to his scholarly work seems... a bit much. Last week the Washington Post ran a story falsely accusing Zakaria of another act of plagiarism... without independently checking to see if the charge had any validity. 

On the other hand, the defenses that have been mounted also seem a bit over the top. Tunku Varadarajan defended Zakaria in Newsweek with an essay that bordered on the sycophantic, all the while accusing Zakaria's accusers of simple envy:

What one has seen in the past few days can only be described as a hideous manifestation of envy—Fareed Envy. Henry Kissinger’s aphorism about academia (where the “politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”) applies with delicious tartness to journalism, where media reporters of the kind who hounded Zakaria occupy the lowest rung and exult at the prospect of pulling people down. Zakaria, by contrast, is insanely successful by the standards of his profession: he has a TV show to which few people of any prominence would refuse an invitation, plus columns at Time, CNN.com, and The Washington Post. He also writes academic-lite books that presidents clutch as they clamber aboard planes, and gives speeches at—it is said—$75,000 a pop. He is as much a brand as he is a journalist: he has “inc.” in his veins.

Zakaria himself responded to the Post's bogus second charge of plagiarism in a somewhat curious manner. Here's what he told them: 

Zakaria, in an interview Monday, defended the practice of not attributing quotes in a popular book. “As I write explicitly [in the book], this is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted,” he said. The book contains “hundreds” of comments and quotes that aren’t attributed because doing so, in context, would “interrupt the flow for the reader,” he said.

He compared his technique to other popular non-fiction authors. “Please look at other books in this genre and you will notice that I'm following standard practice,” he said.

“I should not be judged by a standard that's not applied to everyone else,” he added. “People are piling on with every grudge or vendetta. The charge is totally bogus.”

Ferguson responded to his critics in a similar fashion: 

The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers....

My critics have three things in common. First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in “fact checking,” whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women’s bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of “legitimate rape.”

Their approach is highly effective, and I must remember it if I ever decide to organize an intellectual witch hunt. What makes it so irksome is that it simultaneously dodges the central thesis of my piece and at the same time seeks to brand me as a liar.

I'd feel more sympathy towards Ferguson if his term "liberal blogosphere" obfuscates the fact that a Nobel Prize-winning economist is rebutting Ferguson on his use of facts, and then Ferguson didn't compound his economic errors in a Bloomberg interview. 

So what the hell is going on? 

I think there are three interlocking things going on that explain why everyone feels so cranky.  The first, as I alluded to in my Zakaria post, is that the economics of superstars has now reached the world of public intellectuals.  There's been a lot of talk about "brands" recently, and it gets at how the rewards for intellectual output have expanded at the upper strata: 

Not that long ago, getting a column in Time would have been the pinnacle of a journalist’s career. But expectations and opportunities have grown in the last few years. Many writers now market themselves as separate brands, and their journalism works largely as a promotion for more lucrative endeavors like writing books and public speaking.

Replace "journalist" with "intellectual" and that paragraph still works.  Credentialed thinkers like Zakaria and Ferguson, once they've reached the top, become brands that can multiply their earning potential far more than was the case fifty years ago.  The ways in which the Internet concentrates attention on a Few Big Things means that if you are good and lucky enough to become one of those Big Things, money will rain down on your door.  Over at Esquire, Stephen Marche proffered this explanation for what he would call Ferguson's intellectual devolution:

The real issue isn't the substance of Ferguson's argument, though, which is shallow and basically exploded by this point in time. It isn't even the question of how such garbage managed to be written and published. It is, rather, why did Ferguson write it? The answer is simple but has profound implications for American intellectual life generally: public speaking.

Ferguson's critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent's Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson's writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

That number means that Ferguson doesn't have to please his publishers; he doesn't have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn't have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama's failures at any event you want to have me at.

Now, railing at the One Percent aside (*cough* Esquire's target demograpic *cough*) Marche is really onto something here. I've heard from a few sources that Ferguson resigned his professorship at Harvard Business School (but not Harvard University) because he calculated that if he gave four or five extra talks a year, he could earn his HBS salary without all the tedious teaching obligations. 

Zakaria and Ferguson got to where they are by dint of their own efforts, but the thing about the superstar phenomenon is that there's also an element of caprice involved. The gap between Zakaria and Ferguson, and their replacement-level deep thinkers is pretty narrow; the gap in the financial and intellectual rewards is pretty vast.

So I suspect that there is a bit of jealousy and resentment in some of the criticisms being leveled. These guys earn many multiples of the median intellectual income -- and I guarantee you that the median intellectual doesn't think that either Ferguson or Zakaria is many times smarter. 

The top tier of public intellectuals are doing well in this world, and the best are pretty savvy at marketing their ideas across multiple platforms in a Web 2.0 world. But the same dynamics that push these people to the top also increase their vulnerability to intellectual criticism. As I noted a few years ago:

The most useful function of bloggers is when they engage in the quality control of other public intellectuals. [Richard] Posner believed public intellectuals were in decline because there was no market discipline for poor quality. Even if public intellectuals royally screw up, he argued, the mass public is sufficiently disinterested and disengaged for it not to matter. Bloggers are changing this dynamic, however. If Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman or William Kristol pen substandard essays, blogs have and will provide a wide spectrum of critical feedback.

One can clearly add Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria to this list. Furthermore, the very act of trying to market ideas across platforms -- and the constant drive to generate new content -- leaves these intellectuals vulnerable to criticism. They can get sloppy, like Zakaria, and commit a near-fatal error. They can be tendentious in their use of facts, like Ferguson, and suffer reputational damage. Or, they can simple debase themselves to the point where Evgeny Morozov goes medieval on them. 

For high-flying intellectuals, this kind of public criticism clearly wounds. What the superstar phenomenon gives, it can also threaten to take away (though, to be honest, scandals and bad writing don't seem to actually take away rewards all that often). But in the mind of top-tier public intellectuals, effort and intellect drive their accomplishments, not fortuna. They see online criticism and interpret it as jealousy, pettiness and ideological score-settling. A lot of the time that's exactly what it is -- but the online intellectual ecosystem is also pretty good at fact-checking and substantive criticism. Publc intellectuals don't see that these kinds of criticisms are the flip-side of the very phenomenon that is enriching them in the first place. They also don't realize that in a Web 2.0 world, mere bloggers can fact-check them and scorn them for a lack of citation. 

Which leads to the last thing that I think is going on: this superstar phenomenon is invading one of the last spheres of life where money is not necessarily the Most Important Thing. Getting a Ph.D. means being socialized into a world where an academic job is considered more respectable than becoming a consultant that earns gazillions more in money. The currency in the academic economy is intellectual respect. Even if public criticism doesn't affect their real-world income, it does affect their intellectual standing. Even if Zakaria has left the academy, and Ferguson can "transcend" it, they were socialized into this value system, and they clearly care what their peers think. 

Zakaria's argument that general nonfiction shouldn't be held to the standards of academic discourse rankles academics who know that he should know better -- the first instinct of any person with graduate training is to read the literature and cite, cite, cite. As my friend Delia Lloyd put it:  "I find him culpable because Zakaria comes from the world of academia.... Plagiarism may not be  a major moral failing... in the university setting in which Zakaria was trained and credentialed, it’s pretty much one of the worst crimes you can commit."

As for Ferguson, Timothy Burke blogs about what it is exactly about Ferguson's career arc that nettles him: 

Ferguson would feel more like he was still within the bounds if he either investigated his own distaste for Obama in more reflective, philosophical and recursive ways or if he was willing to lay out a generalized, prescriptive theory of political leadership that didn’t fitfully move the goalposts on intensely granular or particular issues every few seconds. Why? Because I think scholarship requires some measure of self-aware and reflective movement between what you know and what you believe, and the relationship between your own movements and those of your professional peers... A scholar has to believe on some level that things are known or understood only after being investigated, tested, read, interpreted, that there’s something unseemly about robbing the graves and morgues for cast-off “facts” in order to assemble them into a shambling, monstrous conclusion built from a hackish blueprint. Being an intellectual takes some form of thoughtfulness, some respect for evidence and truth, something that goes beyond hollow, sleazy rhetoric that plays dumb every time it gets caught out truncating quotes or doctoring charts. Being an expert means you guide an audience through what is known and said about a subject with some respect for the totality of that knowing and saying before favoring your own interpretation.

Public intellectuals who have PhDs do not want to lose their standing as scholars.  Sure, they can gin up psychological defenses against the hidebound ivory tower, but criticism like the one quoted above will leave a permanent mark. They'll have their riches, but they won't have what they were trained to crave more than anything -- respect. 

In the end, what I think is going on is that, contra Russell Jacoby, top-tier public intellectals have acquired greater power than they used to possess. What they resist on occasion is the responsibility that comes with that power. 

So that's what I think is going on. What do you think? 

Capitalism, not culture, drives progress - Fareed Zakaria

Capitalism, not culture, drives economies

Fareed Zakaria Opinion Writer

The Washington Post, August 1, 2012

Mitt Romney has explained that his comments abroad were simply truth-telling. “I tend to tell people what I actually believe,” he said. With regard to one much-debated comment — on the cultural differences between Israelis and Palestinians — many agree with him. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists including Marc A. Thiessen and John Podhoretz all applauded. Podhoretz wrote: “Anyone who publicizes his remark is helping Romney win the election.”
“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at a fundraiser in Israel, comparing the country’s economic vitality to Palestinian poverty. Certainly there is a pedigree for this idea. Romney cited David Landes, an economics historian. He could have cited Max Weber, the great German scholar who first made this claim 100 years ago in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argued that Protestant values were the most important fuel for economic progress.

The problem is that Weber singled out two cultures as being particularly prone to poverty and stagnation, those of China and Japan. But these have been the world’s fastest-growing large economies over the past five decades. Over the past two decades, the other powerhouse has been India, which was also described for years as having a culture incompatible with economic success — hence the phrase “the Hindu rate of growth,” to describe the country’s once-moribund state.
China was stagnant for centuries and then suddenly and seemingly miraculously, in the 1980s, began to industrialize three times faster than the West. What changed was not China’s culture, which presumably was the same in the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. What changed, starting in 1979, were China’s economic policies.
The same is true for Japan and India. Had Romney spent more time reading Milton Friedman, he would have realized that historically the key driver for economic growth has been the adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies across diverse cultures.
The link between economic policies and performance can be seen even in the country on which Romney was lavishing praise. Israel had many admirable traits in its early decades, but no one would have called it an economic miracle. Its economy was highly statist. Things changed in the 1990s with market-oriented reforms — initiated by Benyamin Netanyahu — and sound monetary policies. As a result, Israel’s economy grew much faster than it had in the 1980s. The miracle Romney was praising had to do with new policies rather than deep culture.
Ironically, the argument that culture is central to a country’s success has been used most frequently by Asian strongmen to argue that their countries need not adopt Western-style democracy. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew has made this case passionately for decades. It is an odd claim, because Singapore’s own success would seem to contradict it. It is not so different from neighboring Malaysia. The crucial difference is that Singapore had extremely good leadership that pursued good economic policies with relentless discipline.
Despite all this evidence, most people still believe that two cultures in particular, African and Islamic, inhibit economic development. But the two countries that will next achieve a gross domestic product of $1 trillion are both Muslim democracies — Turkey and Indonesia. Of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world today, seven are African. The world is changing, and holding on to fixed views of culture means you will miss its changing dynamics.
When societies or people succeed, we search in their cultures for seeds of success. Culture being a large grab bag, you can usually find what you want. We observe the success of Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian people in various societies and attribute it to culture. But it may really stem from the traits of diaspora populations — small groups of entrepreneurial immigrants forced to live by their wits in alien cultures. Interestingly, Palestinians have a reputation around the Middle East for being savvy merchants and traders and have been successful in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Culture is important. It is the shared historical experience of people that is reflected in institutions and practices. But culture changes. German culture in 1935 was different from 1955. Europe was once a hotbed of violent nationalism; today it is postmodern and almost pacifist. The United States was once an isolationist, agrarian republic with a deep suspicion of a standing army. Today it has half of the world’s military power.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.” That remains the wisest statement made about this complicated problem, probably too wise to ever be uttered in an American political campaign.
comments@fareedzakaria.com

 

O mundo pos-americano e o declinio do Imperio - Fareed Zakaria

Neste programa da Globo News, Milênio, o jornalista americano de origem indiana Fareed Zakaria, desmente as previsões declinistas sobre o fim do império americano, mas confirma, no "release 2.0" de seu famoso livro "Post-American World", a emergência de outros países, inclusive o Brasil. Ainda assim, acredita que os EUA dispõem da melhor economia do mundo, a mais flexível, a mais inovativa, e o melhor sistema financeiro do mundo, com problemas conjunturais, mas capacidade de superar e se regenerar...
http://g1.globo.com/videos/globo-news/milenio/v/jornalista-americano-reescreve-seu-livro-depois-das-crises/1650728/

Curiosamente, participei, recentemente, de um livro que pretende discutir as teses de Zakaria sobre o post-American world, com este artigo:
“Attraction and Repulsion: Brazil and the American world”
In: Clark, Sean and Sabrina Hoque (eds.):  
Debating a Post-American World: What Lies Ahead? 
 (London: Routledge, 2011, 288 p.; ISBN-10: 0415690552; ISBN-13: 978-0415690553, p. 135-141).
Em janeiro de 2012 vai estar disponível...