The Post-American World

Zakaria’s argument is that the story of the early twenty-first century is not American decline but “the rise of the rest”: China, India, Brazil and others growing into real economic and political weight, which reduces America’s relative share without shrinking it in absolute terms. He reads the resulting order as genuinely multipolar and messier — power diffusing away from any single centre, including away from states toward firms, cities and networks — and argues the United States retains structural advantages in universities, immigration and adaptability that its politics is squandering. The prescription is that the country stop behaving as the sole pole and start behaving as the convener of a system it no longer dictates.

Why it’s on the list: The final section of Li Lu’s bibliography pairs biography with the contemporary world, and this is the entry that states the condition the rest of the list is read under — a Chinese-born American investor’s world is exactly the multipolar one Zakaria describes.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography — 137 entries across six numbered sections. Kyle saved it as two X posts that between them photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came from the source PDF. Li Lu lists it as W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Fareed Zakaria — the author.
• Geopolitics, Globalization — the diffusion of power is the book’s subject.
• China — the largest single component of “the rise of the rest”.