Fareed Zakaria on the shifting of empires the past 500 years

There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred 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, and culture. For the last twenty years, that dominance has been unrivaled, a phenomenon unprecedented in modern history.

We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called “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. While they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. This growth has been most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it. That is why to call this shift “the rise of Asia” does not describe it accurately. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew at a rate of 4 percent or more. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa, two-thirds of the continent. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term “emerging markets,” has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India; two from China; and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.

~ Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

2008

Fareed Zakaria on the decline of U.S. hegemony and fragility of the rules-based international order

The central challenge in international relations we face is a version of what's going on in the Middle East, which is "can we maintain a rules-based international order that encourages open trade, open commerce, open communication, open information platforms without the great, liberal, hegemon superpower that sustained, built and paid for the international system as it exists today, the United States?"  Because the U.S. is not going to be able to play that role that it's played in the past, partly because it has grown weary, partly because others have risen and will not accept U.S. hegemony.  States like Russia, Iran, groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, are basically trying in various ways to undermine the rules-based order, undermine the international system, burn the house down.  Will they win or will the United States and Europe and Japan and Singapore and Saudi Arabia, all these countries that want order and stability and openness, will they prevail?  That's the big dynamic and that's why what happens in the Middle East has a larger global significance.

~ Fareed Zakaria, "The Conflict in Israel and the State of Foreign Affairs," The Prof G Show - Scott Galloway, 21:15 mark, October 14, 2023