While the economy of the United States is slowly returning to where it was before the recent financial crisis, countries like China and India have not only been catching up but may soon overtake the United States as superpowers, said political analyst Fareed Zakaria, who spoke April 25 in Statler Auditorium.

Zakaria -- host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" airing worldwide, columnist for the Washington Post and this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellowship lecturer at Cornell -- said in his talk, "The Rise of the Rest: The Post-American World," that as other areas of the world become more powerful, the United States has seen slower growth in comparison.

In part, he said, the recent financial crisis is to blame, as it curbed economic growth rates in the Western world and allowed countries like India and China to accelerate their growth and rise to economic and industrial dominance.

Yet, the United States is still considered powerful militarily and politically. But economically, China has managed its economy in some ways more effectively than the United States and quietly risen to power.

According to Zakaria, China is not the only nation to see such revolutionary improvements. The Middle East, for example, is starting to catch up with the rest of the world. And unlike in the past, when the Soviet Union and the United States exemplified two vastly different political systems and every nation seemed to side with one or the other, the emerging new global system has less conflict. And that coincides with "a greater degree of political civility [and] convergence," he said.

He also noted that, while many nations have experienced recessions in the past few years, today's economic climate is much less disruptive than the inflation problems of the past.

"High rampant inflation was deeply destabilizing -- in many ways, more socially disruptive than a recession," Zakaria said. "A recession robs you of what you would have had, [while] inflation destroys what you already have."

Despite the possibility of the "post-American world" where other nations may overtake the United States as superpowers, a bright side to the "post-American" world, Zakaria noted, is that there will be more "burden-sharing."

He added: "The United States is still an enormously dominant country, [but] there's also no question that others are rising to occupy that space."

Zakaria's 2008 New York Times best-seller, "The Post-American World," details the growth of China and other new superpowers. The lecture was sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Olivia Fecteau '11 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.