WSJ Commentary on Obama and Fareed Zakaria
Obama Needs a Better Reading List
June 4, 2008; Page A19
Whether by accident or as a signal to voters of a certain intellectual attainment, Sen. Barack Obama allowed himself to be photographed a few weeks ago carrying a copy of "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria. By the looks of it, Mr. Obama is taking this celebrated young author seriously – in the photo he appears to be marking his place about a third of the way through. Mr. Obama was in Montana that day, and you got the idea he was going to kiss a few babies, deliver the usual bromides about "change," and then get back to plumbing Deep Thoughts about our troubling Global Situation.
As it happens, I have been reading the very same book. Since I have more time on my hands than Mr. Obama, I hereby offer him an executive summary.
It used to be, senator, that bright young foreign-policy pundits turned out a predictable product. Every foreign election, every inflation spike or productivity slowdown overseas was plugged into the same master narrative: country X needed to embrace "free trade"; country Y had allowed labor unions to get too strong; country Z needed to cut taxes and deregulate.
Mr. Zakaria cleverly yokes together this favorite pundit hobbyhorse with another: American decline. The problem, he argues, is not that other lands need to learn the laissez-faire way; it's that they have learned it too well, that they're better at it than we are, and that "the rise of the rest" – namely, China and India – threatens to problematize the precious number-oneness of the U.S.
The facts Mr. Zakaria adduces to prove this have an oddly size-ist bias, as they might say on campus. The tallest building in the world is in Taiwan, he writes; the richest human is a Mexican; and China has the world's biggest factories, biggest shopping malls and its biggest casino.
But don't be alarmed, senator. By this reasoning, one might just as well claim that British health care is better than anyone else's because London has the world's tallest hospital building. Or that Falangist Spain was the acme of piety since Generalissimo Franco built the world's largest crucifix. Similarly, Mr. Zakaria's observation that the world's biggest airplane "is built in Russia and Ukraine" – actually, as far as I can tell, it is a Soviet-era cargo plane, and only one of them was built – might demonstrate, by his logic, that the Soviets were the real victors in the Cold War.
Mr. Zakaria's trademark style, in case you happen to be quizzed, is to noodle aimlessly through world history, wondering why the West managed to triumph over the East and expressing amazement at unremarkable things, like the way distant people adopt some Western customs but not all, or the fact that countries sometimes "forge their own ties with one another" without first getting the say-so of the U.S. At one point he opines that "it is difficult today to remember life back in the dark days of the 1970s, when news was not conveyed instantly."
But in the ways that matter, Mr. Zakaria is faultlessly on-message, especially when it comes to the utter and complete righteousness of markets. Beginning in the '90s, Mr. Zakaria asserts, everyone recognized that "there was only one basic approach to organizing a country's economy." That way, naturally, was the laissez-faire way, as implemented by the famous "Chicago boys" and economist-kings like Jeffrey Sachs.
For Mr. Zakaria, the truly enlightened Americans, the ones who understand the coming order, are apparently Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company and assorted business chieftains. When Mr. Zakaria writes that Third World leaders "have heard Western CEOs explain where the future lies," he means it not as a sarcastic slap at those CEOs but as homage to their wisdom.
Average Americans, meanwhile, give Mr. Zakaria fits, what with their stubborn ignorance of foreign ways and their doubts about free trade. This attitude, in turn, has opened up "a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand, and the majority of the American people, on the other."
A warning here, senator. This is not an idea that will endear you to the people of Montana, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania. Were you to integrate it into your stump speech, you might even deliver the South Side of Chicago over to John McCain.
One more reason to be leery of all this market idolatry: It's wrong. Take the aspect of the "new era" that Mr. Zakaria most admires – "the free movement of capital," the international loans and investments he worships as "globalization's celestial mechanism for discipline." In point of fact, the rise of China and India – Mr. Zakaria's own paradigm cases – was possible only because those countries shunned global commercial credit markets in the 1970s, allowing them to avoid the interest-rate shock of the early '80s.
How do I know this? It's all explained in a far more worthwhile new book, "The Predator State," by James K. Galbraith. At your next photo-op, Mr. Obama, I hope to see you half way through it.
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