Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
By Fareed Zakaria
WW Norton, 2020

CNN host Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book The Post-American World was an audacious performance, an often brilliant imagining of a radically changed international picture, one in which the United States, having laid the groundwork and exported the tools for less powerful or less wealthy nations to excel, then falls victim to its own involuntary largesse and is surpassed by its former rivals. Ten years ago, it seemed like a daring leap of intuition - the kind of leap for which this author is rightfully esteemed, but even so, a stretch.

It took the brainlessly xenophobic “America First” trade belligerence of Donald Trump’s first three years as US President to make a genuinely post-American world seem suddenly very workable, and it took one year of Trump’s homicidally botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic (as late as October of this year, Trump was still flailingly telling his Klan rally audiences that “nobody really knows” why it’s called COVID-19, leading small schoolchildren all over the world to ask their parents a now widely-repeated question: “Why is the President of the United States so dumb?”) to make a post-American world a reality. 

The United States is currently teeming with the virus, posting worse mortality rates than anywhere else in the world even while Trump holds swarmed gatherings of unmasked followers and makes frankly deranged comments about how he ‘beat’ the pandemic that is still killing nearly 1000 Americans every day. And it seems increasingly likely that no matter what the end result of that pandemic will be for the country and the world, the international order will be deeply reshaped by the time the next super-infection breaks out of a jungle of a favela or a laboratory and starts the whole cycle all over again. 

Hence Zakaria’s new book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, which, true to this author’s rather unflinching humanism, starts with, of all things, an encouragement:

It may seem that our world is terribly fragile. It is not. Another way to read human history is to recognize just how tough we are. We have gone through extraordinary change at breathtaking pace. We have seen ice ages and plagues, world wars and revolutions, and yet we have survived and flourished. 

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World is necessarily a Herculean effort at speculation. Since there are many aspects of COVID-19 that are still unknown, since there’s still no fully-tested vaccine, and since both the side effects of that vaccine and the American population’s willingness to take it are unknown (if Trump doesn’t have a personal financial stake in the treatment - as, for instance, he does in the drug regeneron that he’s been touting lately - he’ll call it ‘fake’ and his followers will therefore spurn it), there’s no real way to fashion lessons for a post-pandemic world. Indeed, since no vaccine is likely to have an effectiveness greater than 50% and COVID-19 could easily be supplanted by COVIDs 20, 21, and 22, there may be no such thing as a post-pandemic world at all. 

But despite the prescience of The Post-American World, we don’t come to Zakaria’s books for their crystal ball. It’s fascinating to watch this author’s mind at work, regardless of the direction or likelihood of that work. 

This book ranges across a wide array of possible changes that might be brought about by the plague, and most of the speculation is firmly grounded in the observable present-day realities of shutdown, quarantine, and economic downturn on a global scale. “The short-term effect of the pandemic and lockdowns, of course, has been to curtail all economic activity, domestic and international,” Zakaria writes. “This reversal will probably grow into a phase of real but modest deglobalization.”

As to the human side of all that economic chaos, Zakaria theorizes that the danger of communal workplaces might be the unexpected push that Artificial Intelligence and robotics have needed to make their first really visible inroads into society. Where once a generation of science fiction writers imagined ubiquitous robot servitors as a sign of futuristic advancement, in Zakaria’s picture those servitors are ubiquitous mainly because their human masters are sheltering in place. “The most lasting effect of Covid-19 on AI will likely have less to do with any particular medical breakthroughs than with the rise of robots,” he writes. “More robots in more settings will allow the economy to function while minimizing the dangers of infection.”

And one note in Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World will strike readers of Zakaria’s earlier books as familiar: the world described is still one in which the dominance of the United States is largely a thing of the past, having been replaced by a new multilateralism:

If it works, an international system that gives greater voice to more countries would result in a more vibrant democratic system. Let’s be clear. It all rests on a wager: that the ideas underlying the American-led international order can survive the end of American hegemony. The alternative, a restoration of that hegemony, will not happen.

That last assertion feels somehow less glib and more aspirational than it did back in 2008, before Americans elected a witless would-be autocrat to the Oval Office, and before that would-be autocrat made a fool of himself on the world stage, reneged on long-standing commitments, withdrew from hard-won international accords, and launched a trade war that’s gored the finances of his own countrymen. 

But the hegemony shouldn’t be categorically ruled out. The next would-be autocrat might not be witless.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.