‘The Post-American World’: The Book That Triggered Two of My Own

Raghav Bahl writes on how Fareed Zakaria’s ‘The Post-American World’ prompted him to write two of his own books.

It was May 2008. The world hadn’t quite heard of a guy called Barack Obama. Sure, he was a young, black, half-Muslim, first-time Senator from Chicago who was on some kind of hopeless misadventure to become POTUS (President of the United States). He was gaining a bit of traction in some of the primaries, but his opponent, the very white, liberal, pedigreed, experienced Hillary Clinton should have been a shoo in.

The fit, strapping, six-feet tall Barack Obama had just bounded off his campaign aircraft. He had a book in his hand. Doug Mills, the ever alert photo journalist of The New York Times was on his trail. He clicked, and the picture showed a cheerful Obama clutching The Post-American World. People zoomed in to figure out what this charming, enigmatic politician was reading. Then the trolls latched on to the name of the author. Fareed Zakaria! Another Muslim. The hate got viral. Is Obama reading an anti-American book by a Muslim? The trolling could be pretty vicious even in the stone ages of social media.

Mercifully, truth took over quicker than it does today. Fareed Zakaria was the renowned columnist of Newsweek International, a Harvard-and-Yale educated “not a religious guy”. The trolling subsided, and The Post-American World became an international bestseller.

By then it had tickled my fancy too. I had always been a fan of Zakaria’s columns, agreeing almost entirely with his right of centre economic and socially liberal world view. I picked up a copy, and felt one with Obama, half way across the world, as both of us devoured Zakaria’s perspicacity. Here’s Wikipedia:

In the book, Zakaria argues that, thanks to the actions of the United States in spreading liberal democracy across the world, other countries are now competing with the US in terms of economic, industrial and cultural power. While the US continues to dominate in terms of political-military power, other countries such as China and India are becoming global players in many fields.

The book was not about America’s fall, but the rise of the rest. Of China and India.

India’s story I understood, having cut my teeth on business journalism as the country opened up its economy to the world in 1991. I had had a ringside view to this epochal event. But China was a mystery to me. Here was a country that had a smaller GDP than India in the 1960s; even as late as the early 90s, its per capita income was smaller than India’s. And then, in one humongous hop, skip and jump, it had become five times – yes, let me repeat that slowly, f-i-v-e times, richer than India in less than two decades.

What was China’s secret soya sauce?

This startled enquiry pushed me to write my first book, Superpower?: The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise (Penguin Allen Lane, 2010).

I postulated that China’s economic miracle was built on two pillars: one, it led India in primary education and rural/agricultural productivity in the 1960s. And two, when Deng Xiaoping heaved it towards state capitalism in the 1980s, the Chinese government extracted massive surpluses from its peasants, consumers, savers, workers and foreign investors. It was a brutal expropriation, but one that allowed China to invest in physical/social infrastructure on a scale hitherto unknown to mankind. Such a massive capital binge fuelled an escape velocity which sent the Chinese economy soaring past the low income trap. Of course, there were several nuances, but that was the core narrative.

India, on the other hand, was following a more classical, textbook macro-economic transition; slower, steadier, democratic and cautious. I ended the book on a cautious note myself, asserting it was a fifty-fifty chance that India’s tortoise would catch up with the Chinese hare.

In 2014, I published my second book, SuperEconomies: America, India, China and the Future of the World (Penguin Allen Lane). I inserted America into the binary China-India equation, and projected what a post-American world would look like towards the middle of the 21st century.

I do owe a debt of gratitude to Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World. Many thanks.