Freddy notes Andrew Roberts’ strange review of The Post-American World, but Freddy missed what was by far the strangest remark when he talks about Zakaria’s supposed gloominess:

It’s a pretty gloomy analysis from the man who is advising John McCain on foreign policy [bold mine-DL]…

This CFR page, which is a copy of this Newsweek article, includes a mention of Zakaria’s harsh critique of McCain’s Los Angeles foreign policy address in the passage discussing “analysts not affiliated with McCain’s campaign.”  If he is acting in any formal advisory capacity, it isn’t listed on his bio page.  He is “advising” McCain in the same way that any number of pundits and public intellectuals “advise” candidates to agree with them. 

As for the review itself, it is pretty useless.  Before making the programmatic warnings about “isolationism” and “protectionism,” Roberts concedes that an Indian hegemony wouldn’t be so bad, but Chinese hegemony would be, but this completely misses the point of Zakaria’s book: no other power is going to attain to the sort of unipolar dominance of the world that the U.S. has enjoyed, but the U.S. will not enjoy it in the future, either.  That is a far cry from making declinist arguments that America is doomed to become even a second-tier power, but then perhaps the rest of us are insufficiently “pro-American” to understand these things.