Author: Parag Khanna
Review: Foreign Affairs
It is by now commonplace to argue that the world is in the midst of a great move away from the era of U.S. dominance. These two books seek to map this changing global landscape, offering vivid portraits of a decentralized world system in which all roads do not lead to Washington. With characteristic elegance and insight, Zakaria offers a striking picture of the rapid growth of the non-West. It is not just China or even Asia as a whole that is on the rise; it is the wider market-driven developing world. The coming order will be not an "Asian century" but a rich, globalized amalgam of East and West. Zakaria posits that this is today's great story, auguring a transformation as profound as the rise of the West and the United States' ascendancy. Washington's best strategy, he argues, is to accommodate, rather than resist, these modernizing states, allowing them to become "stakeholders in the new order" in exchange for their strategic cooperation. The future that Zakaria describes is one the United States itself brought forth through decades of global leadership -- but to operate successfully within it, the United States will need to give up its unipolar pretensions, engage other great powers, and champion rules and institutions that are forged out of compromise and mutual adjustment.
Khanna offers a panoramic view of global power shifts, arguing that China and the European Union are joining the United States to form a world with three "relatively equal centers of influence." Each power center has its own "diplomatic style": the United States works through "coalitions," China operates through "consultations," and Europe seeks "consensus." The fate of world order, however, will hinge on how the next tier of states -- the so-called Second World, or "tipping-point states" -- choose to ally with or resist these three competing poles. Most of the book is a sort of travelogue in which Khanna reports his observations about the ideas and aspirations of peoples he meets across the Second World. Some readers will find the breezy reporting appealing, and others will find it all a bit insubstantial. What is missing is a developed theory of world politics to guide the empirical narrative. A vaguely realist perspective lurks, but very little is said about how power, order, legitimacy, institutions, democracy, or global capitalism operates -- or even how they matter.
Zakaria roots his analysis in the deep forces of capitalism and modernization, whereas Khanna focuses on power politics and clashing diplomatic styles. But both see a world in which the United States necessarily yields power and influence to others. The question is, in the process, does it help create a one-world system that serves its interests or a world of competing geopolitical blocs that does not? Perhaps ironically, the United States will have a great deal of influence over which of these ways the world turns.
Review 2: National Review
PARAG KHANNA's The Second World is a great book that deserves wide reading but not wide debate. Some incorrectly position Khanna between Fukuyama's End of History and Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. He is more accurately triangulated with historian-strategist Robert Kaplan and columnist-guru Thomas Friedman: brilliantly observant like Kaplan and epigrammatically clever like Friedman, but simply not up to the task of making strategic sense of it all. When it comes to grand strategic vision, Khanna basically punts, tossing off a 19th-century rehash of hemispheric empires. Nonetheless, this is an impressive first book by an author who's likely, as he matures (he just passed 30), to produce much better strategic analysis to go along with his already well-developed ear for hearing what locals are actually saying--a skill in short supply right now in America.
Khanna's volume really consists of two books: a thrilling tour d'horizon of the world that populates five very meaty layers of a would-be grand strategic sandwich--wrapped by a "big idea" essay that ultimately fails to hold the concoction together. The "big idea" in a nutshell: America's world order is crumbling while China's alternative universe is booming; meanwhile, Europe isn't merely plodding along but is redefining human history by pioneering the world's first multinational superstate--America's two-plus-centuries-old version notwithstanding. Inevitably, each superpower will dominate its own hemisphere, meaning America will hold on--just barely--to Latin America, Asia will be for Asians (with China calling all the shots), and Europe will not only absorb everybody right up to the Urals but likewise recreate the contours of the Roman Empire and basically pick up sub-Saharan Africa in the bargain. Oh, and the medium-sized states that'll be absorbed into these empires actually hold the balance of world power in their hands ... uh ... when they're not being absorbed by these unstoppable empires that, it turns out in the end, actually need to be nice to one another to avoid triggering the next world war.
The first problem with this all-encompassing argument is that Khanna personifies nations and their governments too much. While giving them personalities and putting them on the analytical couch yields a mother lode of witty lines (a favorite of mine being, "China is only dating Latin America, not marrying it"), often the result comes off as merely glib ("But Azerbaijan was blessed with oil, not wisdom"). Most experts agree that globalization empowers non-state actors more than states, leading to the declining importance of governments in shaping our collective future, but in Khanna's world, governments seem to act with a degree of freedom and coherent intelligence (save for those idiot Azeris) that strikes me as quaint.
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Second, Khanna seems to come from the "power" school of international relations, in that he makes a near fetish of the concept. Whatever power consists of, China is getting lots more while Europe is banking it incrementally, which should come in handy as it gets old (hold that thought!). Of course, freaked-out fatty America is rapidly losing virility: Our military can't run the world all by itself, therefore we are proven increasingly irrelevant in the all-important power category. China, we are told, has "neutered" America throughout most of Asia, as any power gain by Beijing--clearly--results in a zero-sum power loss for us. China "seduces" its neighbors (with whom, one suspects, it will sleep, but also not marry) with its raw market power and, if offended, need merely signal that another nation has "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people" to exact "tribute." Why? The "incalculable potential" of these 1.3 billion people has clearly slated China to "supplant the United States as the world's leading power." But don't forget about the "amplifying power" of China's 55-millionstrong diaspora that, in apparent lockstep with Beijing's power-spreading plans for regional and then global domination, executes as required.
The biggest problem with this grand thesis is that it compels Khanna to gloss over defects in China and Europe while exaggerating their virtues. The author also rather crudely bashes America throughout, in keeping with today's intellectual sophistry of extrapolating the Bush administration's failures to a complete indictment of our entire way of life and the supposed end of American empire.
In Khanna's account, the Chinese and Europeans apparently calculate every national move to the nth degree, but cowboy America is a mass of conflicting impulses and deep-seated paranoia. America's cruel capitalism is completely beyond the control of our clueless government bureaucracy whereas China, blessed with a Communist party that is "more powerful, sophisticated, and complex than any Chinese dynasty in history," confidently manipulates its "tightly regulated capitalist economy" that's blessed with a rising "generation of technocrats competing more or less meritocratically for influence" within a political system apparently unmarred by corruption or nepotism. Bloated America, which "is not a healthy country compared to its first-world peers," is increasingly outclassed both economically and politically by the European Union superstate, which, despite purposefully making itself poorer each time it expands eastward, apparently grows more powerful as it does so. Thus morally sick America, burdened by military empire, may well be brought down by its irrational Christianity (just as the Roman Empire was!), while Brussels, the "new Rome," marches confidently east- and southward.
For someone so concerned with power rankings and given to bold, forward-leaning statements ("As Turkey becomes more European, Europe becomes more Turkish"), Khanna is puzzlingly casual in his treatment of demographics. The reality of Europe's aging profile is apparently yet another source of imperial power, not a weakness as so many serious observers have warned. Khanna declares in one breath that "Europe needs to expand, or Europe will die," but then quickly adds that "Europe's growing diversity makes European-ness a gradually attainable ideal rather than a mythical Platonic form, transforming Europe's identities from tribal to cosmopolitan." Whew! And here I was thinking it was going to be hard! But apparently that fabled Brussels bureaucrat, sitting in his "office of wall-to-wall technocratic studies," has already cracked the code: "The 'new European commonwealth' has come to embody an ancient imperial truism that the Romans, Mongols, and Ottomans understood but that the Soviet Union never did: A successful empire cannot be racist." Don't get me wrong: I like Khanna's optimism about the EU, but just tossing off the question of Europe's cultural identity as it grows simultaneously older and more Muslim is strategically sophomoric.
And Khanna's uncritical take on China's demographics is downright stunning. He basically ignores the tsunami of aging that will generate a gargantuan body count of impoverished rural elders over the next couple of decades. It's called the "4:2:1 problem": four grandparents, two parents, and one child to rue them all. Sure, it's glorious to be rich, but China's going to get awfully old before it gets wealthy enough to handle that stunning burden. Meanwhile, Khanna confidently intones that "the Pacific Era will be led by China--and no one else." How to reconcile such ambition with aging? We're told that the Chinese are seriously checking out the EU's social-welfare models. Hmm; sounds like a world-conquering plan to me.
As for Khanna's much-hyped "Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere," here we're treated with the specter of Chinese baby-boomers buying retirement properties "from Penang to Bali" while Beijing grants its neighbors "greater market access and sustain[s] trade deficits ... in exchange for raw materials, defense agreements, and diplomatic pledges to lean its way." The realist in me fears that all we're really seeing here is China doing to all of Asia what it's already done to itself: recklessly rapid development that has essentially bankrupted an already thin environmental base. What does Khanna have to say about China's environment? He quickly notes that China sports some of the world's dirtiest cities and then moves on to wind farms and solar power and says Beijing will offshore its pollutants to remote regions, just as a "giant Singapore" would.
China likewise gets a pass on its skyrocketing food and water requirements. Many serious students of globalization's rising resource requirements see a future of not just hyper-connectivity among societies but hyper-dependency among economies--especially with regard to food. In that world, I see national governments working the middle instead of commanding the strategic heights. But Khanna is having none of that: No, we'll end up with George Orwell's competing empires of Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania increasingly scrapping with one another over dwindling resources, with the only question being, "How will the next world war be averted?" Khanna's answer is unsurprising: With three hemispheric empires on the rise, the next step in good global governance is a "three-legged U.S.-EU-China stool" where "peace, justice, and order will only follow from equilibrium."
At this point I start to get angry: Khanna has spent all this time getting me upset about China's takeover of the planet and the EU's snatching up of its leftovers, while stupid, fat America can't get off the couch. But then he says a slimmed-down G-8 + China can ensure world peace. So why all the Sturm und Drang?
I'll tell you why. Khanna, after visiting 100 countries over several years to build up all these impressions, couldn't be satisfied doing what the interior of this book accomplishes magnificently: giving the reader a series of witty, intelligent, insightful portraits of regions and countries struggling to find their way amid globalization's explosive advance. I mean, that's an incredibly useful book to read, but it's not a "big idea" book to market. So either Khanna or his publisher decided to obscure this brilliant globalization travelogue with cliched images of empires and world war and a "second world" either held in the balance or holding the balance (I honestly had trouble figuring out which).
Read this book as I've suggested. No, it's nowhere near a "definitive guide to world politics for years to come," as its jacket copy promises, but it is an intelligent, nuanced, and highly informative tour of globalization's mid-range economies today, and you'll be a lot smarter for exploring these places with such a smart guide.
