The Post-American World

Zakaria does not use this specific term; the World Bank introduced it as he was writing the book. Still, he spends considerable time on the problem it describes: the condition whereupon a developing country is able to move from poverty into a middle-income status but cannot transition from middle-income status to high-income status. This is most frequently seen in countries that rely on the manufacturing of exports to escape poverty—this works to the extent that the sale of exports helps build reserves of foreign capital. However, since the desirability of those exports often relies on low labor costs, the actual benefit to the workforce can be modest, and they might lose out to more productive sources of the same goods. Getting out of the middle-income trap is typically thought to involve building up a domestic labor force that is educated enough to be competitive in a host of global industries (including services and innovation), who are then wealthy enough to provide a reliable market for the country’s own products.

“Polarity” refers to the number of “great powers” or states that occupy the top tier of military and economic capabilities within an international system. For decades, especially after the end of the Cold War, the system was arguably “unipolar,” as the United States occupied the top tier alone after the Soviet Union collapsed. France and Britain were already in decline, and states like China and India were barely beginning the long process of development. The trends that Zakaria sees developing promise the return of a more multipolar system, where there are multiple centers of power balancing one another rather than one hegemon dividing the world between its allies and enemies. Some fear that such a world will be much less stable and more prone to conflict, but since Zakaria regards economic power as having increasing importance relative to military power, he tends to regard it as an overwhelmingly positive development that will help spread the benefits of global capitalism into increasingly more hands.

Although this term has largely fallen out of favor, Zakaria occasionally uses it to signal its precise historical meaning of postcolonial states emerging in the 1950s and 1960s that were supposed to form a large and neutral bloc between the competing parties of the Cold War. Unlike the “first” capitalist world or the “second” communist one, the “Third World,” representing most of the world’s population, prioritized a pragmatic approach to development rather than ideological rigidity (major examples included India under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesia under Sukarno). However, the term “Third World” came to be associated with corruption and poverty, as the Cold War superpowers exploited it ruthlessly as part of their rivalry with each other. The term “Global South” has emerged as a broader and more neutral term to describe developing nations, but Zakaria is ultimately interested in a narrower set of nations—China and India but also Brazil, South Africa, and others—that are not just developing but powerful enough to assert independence from the West.