— From Fareed Zakaria, June 30th 2011 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR —
Q. If you were running for office, do you think you would even be able to say what you say in the book, which is that we’re moving toward a post-American world, and this period is about the rise of the rest?
A. That’s a very good question. It is an awkward thing to say if you are running for office in the United States because, you know, the nature of a campaign tends to be about how the United States is number one, rah, rah, rah.
But you can’t fight facts. The fact of the matter is that by almost every measure, other countries are moving up, and they’re moving up into space that used to be dominated by the United States and the Western world. So I don’t know how you can fight those facts. They are very awkward, and it’s very difficult to have to accept that we are going to have to share power.
Sometimes the way I like to put it is, we have to remember that the United States has been a beacon of hope and liberty. It has been an incredibly prosperous and vibrant society for many, many decades before 1945.
You know, we were not always the absolute supreme power in the world, and we were still an unusual, distinctive, wonderful country. I’m not predicting that we’re going to go all the way back to that, but I think it’s important to understand that the nature of America, our DNA as a society is not bound up with being a world empire.