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Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:
In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]
The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.
Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.
Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.
See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.
The exact number depends on how you count, but it's clear that Obama has essentially erased Clinton's lead in superdelegates (ABC News):
Sen. Barack Obama moved into the lead today in the last category that Sen. Hillary Clinton had claimed to have an edge — support among the Democratic Party's superdelegates.
The Illinois Democrat grabbed the superdelegate lead thanks to a switch by New Jersey Rep. Donald Payne and an endorsement from previously uncommitted Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon.
Those two votes gave Obama a 267–266 lead over Clinton. That is a huge shift since the days when Clinton boasted about a 60-plus vote lead among the party's pros back on Super Tuesday.
And Obama's lead will only get wider.
When I first heard Hillary's statements about "hard working Americans (vs lazy Americans) and White voters without college degrees (student loans have dried up?)
supporting her above Obama, I gasped..Hillary! Is this the same women married to the First BLack President??
Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, May 9, 2008; Page A27
From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That's why she is falling short -- and that's why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines.




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