{"id":2576,"date":"2008-01-27T06:18:13","date_gmt":"2008-01-27T06:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2576"},"modified":"2008-01-28T03:05:51","modified_gmt":"2008-01-28T03:05:51","slug":"parag-khannas-global-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=2576","title":{"rendered":"Parag Khanna’s Global Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abu Muqawama<\/a><\/strong> pointed to a \u00a0must-read\u00a0essay in The New York Times Magazine<\/em><\/strong> <\/a>by Parag Khanna<\/strong> <\/a>of The New America Foundation<\/strong> <\/a>( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors<\/a>). This is a lengthy,\u00a0grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative American decline and a coming age of superstate multipolarity with a critical “swing vote” being held by New Core\/Seam states like Russia and Brazil.<\/p>\n

“Waving Goodbye to Hegemony<\/a>”<\/p>\n

The Geopolitical Marketplace<\/strong><\/p>\n

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing – and losing – in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not <\/strong>India<\/strong><\/a>, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules – their own rules – without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0reaction\u00a0to Khanna’s essay, distilled from his upcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order<\/a><\/strong>, <\/strong>are mixed.\u00a0 Clearly, great effort and thought that has been put into this project by the well-read Mr. Khanna and his Thomas Friedmanesque globetrotting reportage is nothing but\u00a0impressive. Clearly, Parag Khanna “gets” that globalization is a\u00a0dynamic and complex system with interdependent “frenemies”; which I infer that he splices liberally\u00a0with geopolitics and \u00a0the hard cultural conflict of Sam Huntington. A synthesis of civilizational conflict and convergence.<\/p>\n

While erudite,\u00a0Khanna’s geo-economic\/political argument regarding the inevitable decline of the\u00a0liberal international order\u00a0has been made before (anyone recall Lester Thurow<\/strong> or Paul Kennedy<\/strong>?)\u00a0in the early 1990’s, the 1970’s, late 1950’s, early 1930’s and perhaps originally in the gripping angst of the Lost Generation of WWI. Perhaps even further, as Russian intellectuals of the Silver Age like Aleksandr Blok<\/strong> were already worrying themselves sick\u00a0about\u00a0” the Yellow Peril” even before the Russo-Japanese War.\u00a0 And as he freely admits,\u00a0Khanna’s geopolitical model of three, contending global centers of gravity bears a strong resemblence to Orwell’s. Khanna offers some sound, if modest,\u00a0advice for American policy makers though the soundness of his counsel is independent of the validity of his thesis. There’s a great deal of glossing over the longitudinal\u00a0weaknesses of the EU and China and minimizing of \u00a0the adaptiveness of America in this essay in order to make the declinist narrative as deterministic\u00a0 as it comes across.<\/p>\n

That being said, well worth your time to pop open a cold one and read it.<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr. Nexon<\/strong> has his evaluation of his former student’s work\u00a0at The Duck of Minerva<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

ADDENDUM II:<\/strong><\/p>\n

CKR<\/strong> <\/a>has an awesome critique in the comments section here.<\/p>\n

Dr. HistoryGuy99<\/a><\/strong> has entered the building<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Libby<\/strong> at The Newshoggers<\/strong> takes note<\/a>.<\/p>\n

protein wisdom<\/strong> rejects it as unwise<\/a> – and I agree that the article probably reflects the geopolitical\u00a0hopes of some NYT editors in their lighter moments when they are not too\u00a0busy\u00a0slandering Iraq War veterans.<\/p>\n

Love fest from Washington Note<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abu Muqawama pointed to a \u00a0must-read\u00a0essay in The New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna of The New America Foundation ( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors). This is a lengthy,\u00a0grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,361,100,65,332,118,87,37,178,78,336,270,127,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-america","category-east-asian-nato","category-economic-determinism","category-economics","category-empire","category-foreign-policy","category-futurism","category-geopolitics","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-national-security","category-strategy","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}