# The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest



## daftandbarmy (24 Apr 2008)

Go Yanks.... the alternative is pretty scary

The Future of American Power
How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest

Summary:  Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

FAREED ZAKARIA is Editor of Newsweek International. This essay is adapted from his book The Post-American World (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., © 2008 by Fareed Zakaria).

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501facomment87303/fareed-zakaria/the-future-of-american-power.html


----------



## Edward Campbell (24 Apr 2008)

But see also:  Grand Strategy for a Divided America and  US Foreign Policy: 2009 and Beyond for related discussions, including in the latter link, essays on foreign policy by Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama.


----------



## Edward Campbell (24 Apr 2008)

An excellent article, but it needs to be read, in the early going, in conjunction with Mead’s _God and Gold_ and Thomas P Barnett’s thesis that Britain made a brilliant foreign policy choice _circa_ 1890 (when   Sir Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, scion of the ever influential Cecil family, was foreign secretary) to hitch its wagon to America’s rising star.

Demographics matter, at Zakaria says, but culture matters *more*. The absolute genius of the American _system_ is that they manage to maintain a dynamic, immigrant fuelled economy whilst, simultaneously, making the immigrants part of the larger, 600 year old Anglo-American _culture_.


----------

