Fareed Zakaria In General

While reading Fareed Zakaria's article "The Rise of the Rest", two ideas popped out at me as particularly striking, mainly because they combined the ideas of Fukuyama's "End of History" and Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" in an interesting way. Zakaria is very emphatic about the idea that the United States has not lost its ability to lead the world in several aspects. Economically, especially in the system, Zakaria sees the US as a force to be reckoned with, and he generally believes that the American system of free markets and democracy have proven themselves to be the best systems for most nations. However, Zakaria's worldview on democracy and capitalism (outside of this article) put emphasis on the presence of institutions before full systems can be developed. This point of view is perfectly in line with Fukuyama's, who essentially wrote that free markets and democracy had proven themselves to be most effective systems in the modern world, as well as his complete adoration for institutions (which he elaborates on thouroughly in "State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century".)

Despite his similar opinion on state-building, Zakaria also takes a stance close to that of Friedman regarding globalization. He makes the point that

"Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining depth and breadth. America has benefited massively from these trends. It has enjoyed unusually robust growth, low unemployment and inflation, and received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. These are not signs of economic collapse. Its companies have entered new countries and industries with great success, using global supply chains and technology to stay in the vanguard of efficiency. U.S. exports and manufacturing have actually held their ground and services have boomed."

Zakaria, while hesitant about leaping straight into full scale globalization, seems to believe that the integration of the US economy into the global one has not been a bad thing.

The odd combination of Fukuyama and Friedman was unexpected, it also made for an interesting read of Zakaria's article.