America's Place in the New Global Order

The ominous sounding "The Quandary of a Superpower As Others Race to Catch Up" yields a lovely, concise "compare and contrast" review of two books about America's future in Sunday's New York Times. Reviewer Stephen Kotkin summarizes and analyzes "The Return of History and the End of Dreams," by the journalist and thinker Robert Kagan, and "The Post-American World," by Fareed Zakaria.

Kagan, a conservative, and Zakaria, a liberal, come to the same conclusion: America is going to remain on top of the world. They think, however, that it would do so more comfortably if its politicians would shift gears.

Kotkin lauds Kaplan's insights into the political economy of the modern world, but despises his ultimate answer to America's issues: a League of Democracies that would stop autocrats from misbehaving. As Kotkin puts it, "Countries do not act and align in the international arena primarily based on their political systems..."

Nor is Kotkin uncritical of "The Post-American World," calling it mis-titled and glib. But overall he would seem to see it as the better of the two books, and the more realistic. He concludes by saying "Mr. Zakaria's book is actually a brilliant brief about how the world may even globalize Washington."

That hope may be vain: national political bodies, after all, are immune from the direct impact of the global market forces that disrupt so many businesses now. But readers of Kotkin's review can gain a quick thumbnail of where two very different authors see promise and potential peril from globalization.