Zero-Sum Future
American Power in an Age of Anxiety
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Publisher Description
With a new foreword on the revolutions in the Arab world and the euro crisis, one of the world’s most influential commentators on international affairs offers a stark warning about a gathering global political crisis.
From one of the world’s most influential commentators on international affairs, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, comes a stark warning about a gathering global political crisis.
Successive presidents have welcomed globalization and the rise of China. But with American unemployment stubbornly high and U.S. power facing new challenges, the stage is set for growing rivalry between America and China. The European Union is also ripping itself apart. The win-win logic of globalization is giving way to a zero-sum logic of political and economic struggle.
The new world we now live in, an age of anxiety, is a less prosperous, less stable world, with old ideas overthrown and new ideologies and powers on the rise. Rachman shows how zero-sum logic is thwarting efforts to deal with global problems from Afghanistan to unemployment, climate change to nuclear proliferation.
This timely and important book details why international politics is now more dangerous and volatile—and suggests what can be done to break away from the crippling logic of a zero-sum world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, charts how the putative "win-win" promise of globalization has fizzled: the world is ever more fragmented and locked into a zero-sum ideology, in which the U.S. is pitted starkly against a rising China. Rachman's brisk analysis traces the waves of change as an "Age of Transformation" (1978 1991) with its spread of democratization and economic liberalization reached an apotheosis in an "Age of Optimism" (1991 2008) only to be supplanted woefully by our present "Age of Anxiety": the world in the throes of an economic crisis that's shaken established powers, an infighting E.U., assertive emerging economies, and world leaders deadlocked in dealing with present challenges. For the U.S. to retreat from the jockeying and jostling between democracies and prosperous authoritarian powers such as China and Russia, will not be easy, but even if the present is poised on "dangerous instability," Rachman ends with a salutary note. The arc of democracy (and the prosperity he believes attends it) is long, he suggests, but temporarily blocked, yet "progress will eventually resume."
