I hope that Fareed Zakaria is right in his contention that we are living in, and, unless we completely blow it, will go on living in "scarily peaceful times." But I very much doubt that he is. The problem with his argument, I think, is that he reads too much into into two indisputable facts of the current moment --- that there are fewer major wars taking place than in living memory and that there is a greater level of global economic integration than at any time in history.

The principal reason, I think, that these facts are less significant than Zakaria believes they are (and that both he and I would like them to be) is that they are backward rather forward looking --- much in the way certain economic statistics better reflect the past state of the economy than serve as a useful basis for predicting its future. As I expect Zakaria would agree, there have been such periods in the recent past. Think of the 1990s, when after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed for those brief, happily self-deluded years that the liberal capitalist model had swept all before it, and that this capitalist tide was lifting all economic boats; that the wars that great powers, and above all the US, would likely be engaged in would henceforth be wars of choice, not necessity, and likely wars like Bosnia and Kosovo --- that is to say wars in which the national interest, from a realist perspective anyway, were less than self-evident; and that, grave as they remained, problems of want, above all disease and hunger, and threats to the environment were diminishing.

The picture in 2008 is very different from the one I have just described.

One does not have to be an apocalypt to worry about the effects of global warming, though I personally feel uncomfortable taking a strong position on this given my own lack of expertise. But one does not have to be a climate scientist or an environmental expert to see that the 'rising tide will lift all boats' theory is highly questionable. To the contrary, the hunger crisis --- a combination of the steadily rising cost of food globally and the fact that new prosperity in coastal China and parts of India has made it more profitable for countries where there is hunger to export the food they produce than to sell it for less on often regulated domestic markets --- demonstrates that at least in some arenas the remarkable successes of globalization for some have been calamitous for others. And even within the framework of the new prosperity of at least the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), the environmental effects of tens if not hundreds of millions of new automobiles and trucks sold in the coming decade are likely to be momentous and it is very difficult for me to see how they will not be very grave indeed both in terms of pollution and pressure on worldwide energy supply.

I'm a great admirer of Fareed Zakaria's but I feel his highly irenic book --- for all its warnings about what will happen if the US continues to seek a 'maximalist' version of hegemony that the Bush administration has been drawn to and Senator McCain seems to want to continue --- radically understates the contradiction, in environmental, nutritional, and raw materials terms of even successful globalization.

Again, I entirely agree with and am grateful for Zakaria's debunking of the myths --- all too influential in America at the present time, and despite what Democrats often like to claim, hardly restricted to Republicans --- that the US is in existential danger at the present time, that somehow every political, cultural, and economic indicator is a harbinger of doom, and that the only thing to do is hunker down. For that alone, his book performs a very useful service indeed. Where it errs, from my perspective, anyway, is in its utter dependence on the theory that newly emerging powers like Russia and China "want to grow within the existing world order."

Zakaria seems unwilling to take seriously the possibility that these states want to do nothing of the sort. And yet to me it seems obvious that the Russians and the Chinese are finally putting into place an authoritarian version of capitalism, that, although posited decades ago by Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, never seemed like a serious competitor to the liberal capitalist model of the post-1945 world. Perhaps if the world really did operate only on materialist grounds this might be the case. But it does not: honor, prestige, the desire to dominate --- these are all part of the global scene as well. And to put the matter starkly, the fact that we in the West do not consider the Chinese or Russian model attractive does not mean that in the rest of the world leaders don't take a very different and more receptive view. In any case, increasing Chinese domination of certain markets in Africa is likely to make their model at least a powerful competitor on that continent. God is with the big battalions and all that.

The experience of the human rights and 'democracy-building' movements are relevant in this regard. Increasingly, from Georgia to Thailand (I am not just speaking of floridly iniquitous regimes like Burma and Uzbekistan), states are pushing back against demands for true liberalization. And unlike in the past, where the voices of the most powerful liberal capitalist democracies --- above all in Washington and Brussels --- were dispositive if activists could rouse them, today, authoritarian governments have other powerful friends to turn to and use as counter-balances. As one of the first people to point out the reality of illibral democracies, Zakaria knows this better than anyone. And yet in his new book, the phenomenon --- in fact increasing central to politics in much of the world --- is not given the emphasis it deserves. Had he done so, I do not believe Zakaria could have drawn the conclusions he has.

Let me conclude by coming back to the question of honor and prestige --- an issue on which, despite my complete disagreement with his claim that American power is fundamentally a force for good in the world, I think Robert Kagan is far closer to the mark than Zakaria, much as I might wish it otherwise. Perhaps it is best posed as a question: why should ambitious, proud countries like Russia and China (and I believe, in time, India and Brazil as well) choose to "grow within the existing world order," when that world order is largely the creation of the United States and when the US claims special privileges for itself (to intervene militarily, and these days even more crucially, to have one set of rules for its own currency and a far less favorable regime for everyone else's)?

Now were this world order --- call the UN order, the NATO order, the GATT/WTO order, the Bretton Woods order, it makes little difference --- in coherent shape, that might make the BRIC countries behave in the way Zakaria posits. But that order is on the verge of collapse --- as well it should be: imagine that the same political arrangements fundamentally set between 1843 and 1849 had still largely been in place in 1908 --- and it seems to me that Russian and Chinese planners will be unwlling to ever join it unless the US were to assent to a radical reform that would be very much a curtailment of its unique hegemonic role. And I do not see that happening under a President Clinton or a President Obama, let alone a President McCain, and in fact under any foreseeable set of circumstances this side of a systemic collapse --- something I do not think at all likely.

As for the wars, they'll come alas; like the poor, they will always be with us. So unlike Fareed Zakaria, whose message seems to be 'get a grip, America; relax a bit; and be a bit more reasonable,' my advice is the same as Bette Davis's is "Along About Eve": "buckle you're seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."