ABSTRACT
Zakaria's The Post-American World is loaded with sound prescriptions for US foreign policy. Written in the wake of the many failed and bellicose foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration, his conclusion that the United States should stop trying to be feared rather than loved seems self-evident. He clearly lays out the self-defeating and unsustainable nature of aggressive unilateralism, and calls for Washington to accommodate itself to the “rise of the rest” with a more open, tolerant policy of multilateralism. With so many sound prescriptions in his book, it is hard to play the critic. Nonetheless, Zakaria's analysis is flawed by his unnecessary reliance on a flawed conceptual framework, the notion of the United States as the “hegemon” in the current international system.
