Viewed from the United States, there are three ways of looking at the rise of China and India: as an illusion, as a threat or as an opportunity. Fareed Zakaria is an optimist.

Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, came to the US as an 18-year-old student from India. But, in many ways, this is a very American book - both in its optimism and in its determination to leave the reader with useful lessons.

Much of the material in The Post-American World will be well known to anyone with a passing interest in international affairs: the stunning economic growth in Asia; the challenge to America’s post cold-war hegemony; the parallels between modern America and the British empire. Zakaria tells this story in a convincing and entertaining way. But it is familiar stuff.

The novel feature of Zakaria’s book is its effort to argue that “the rise of the rest” need not entail the decline of the US.

To illustrate his point, he draws an analogy with tennis. A generation ago, American players dominated the US Open. Now they have to share the prizes with players from other nations. This does not mean that Americans have suddenly got worse at tennis. It is just that others have learnt how to play the game.

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Three more books arrived today. I shouldn’t let this get me down. Obviously, in many ways it’s a very nice aspect of my job that I keep being sent interesting new books - for free. But the pile of unread tomes on my desk is a bit lowering.

One of the British Sunday papers has a quiz that includes the question “what percentage of the books on your shelves have you actually read?” My answer has always been - “about 50%” - and even that is probably charitable. But with new books arriving all the time, my hit rate is going down fast.

The three that arrived today are “Fidel Castro, My Life” (Penguin) by - well - Fidel Castro; “The Powers to Lead”  (Oxford) by Joseph Nye - he of “soft power” fame. And “In Sickness and in Power” (Methuen) - a tome by David Owen, a former British foreign secretary and doctor, about people who fell ill when in power. I have put all three on the pile and I look at them occasionally - and they look back at me, reproachfully. (more…)

If you browse down my blogroll, you will see a link to the excellent and eclectic Normblog.

Norm has asked me to write a piece on a favourite book, which you can find here. Seeing my effort on screen, it seems extremely short and perfunctory. But some of the other efforts in Norm’s “writers choice” series are really good. I particularly recommend the essays by John Lloyd, Francis Wheen and Christopher Hitchens.

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Derk-Jan Eppink, a Dutch civil servant, has done something unique. He has written a genuinely entertaining book about the European Commission.

Of course, there is no shortage of books about the commission and the workings of the Brussels bureaucracy. But most of them are horribly dull. They are written by academics and aimed at other academics, or students or would-be eurocrats. Nobody would consider reading them for pleasure.

Eppink’s work is different for three reasons. First, he was a journalist before he was a civil servant: he can tell a story and has an eye for anecdotes. Second, although he thinks that the European Union is definitely a force for good, he does not have a religious belief in "the project". As a result, he is able to ask awkward - and important - questions about the future of the EU. Last but not least, he has a sense of humour.

Eppink can take something that sounds very dull - a discussion with a French trade unionist about the EU’s postal-services directive, for example - and turn it into an amusing story that tells you something important about how the EU operates. (In this case, that French trade unionists are a powerful and stubborn force working against economic liberalisation.)

You can read the remainder of this review here, and post a comment below.

It is now clear that America’s decision to invade Iraq was a grave mistake. The US is searching for a way out of the war and a presidential election is in the offing. Under the circumstances, one might expect a passionate and informed debate to be taking place about America’s role in the world.

In fact, the foreign policy argument in the US is rather disappointing. It sometimes looks as if Americans are so shell-shocked by the debacle of Iraq that they are unable to think clearly or boldly. The presidential election campaign seems actually to be inhibiting debate, as candidates cautiously manoeuvre for position – and seek to avoid making politically costly errors.

The complete review for the three books below can be read here and comments can be made below.

The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing
By Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke

Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror
By Ian Shapiro

Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World
By Philip Gordon

Last night I went to the London launch party for Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is not Great – The Case Against Religion. The book seems to have hit a nerve. It is on the New York Times best-seller list – in fact it briefly got to number one.

Hitchens was my boss (or possibly just colleague, he’s not a very managerial type) in Washington in the early 1990s. We were both working for a now defunct British newspaper called The Sunday Correspondent – nicknamed “The Despondent” because of its irreversible downward spiral. I can still remember our first lunch. I would like to say that this is because of the sparkling nature of the conversation. In fact, it is because of the frightening amount that we drank. I staggered home afterwards and fell asleep for a few hours. At 5pm I got up and called Hitchens to discover that he had gone home and written a 2,000 word essay on WH Auden.

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I have a guilty pleasure. One of the literary forms I most enjoy is the savage book review. The pleasure is a guilty one because you cannot avoid feeling a twinge of pity for the victim. Imagine the mortification: you spend months or years, labouring away on a book. And what do you get in return – public vilification and humiliation.

But the author of a truly savage book review is still performing a public service. If you publish a book, you are asking to be taken seriously. A “good” bad review does precisely this. It engages with the text far more vigorously than the usual tepid praise by a reviewer who has flicked quickly through a volume. And the best savage reviews are usually very funny. All of the four articles that I link to below - by Garrison Keillor, Robert Kagan, Matt Taibbi and Clive Crook – made me laugh out loud. This post is really just a way of drawing them to your attention.

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