Around the same time that I was reading Easternization, I was reading [[ASIN:B001NLL946 The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century]] and Al Gore's [[ASIN:B009MYD9EE The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change]].

All three have very different visions of the future.

Rachman's and Gore take fairly conventional views. Rachman sees the rise of China and the decline of America.
Gore shows how people have constantly been predicting the fall the USA for the last 100 years.

Rachman fails to seriously discuss the demographic issues that China will face.

Gore is the only one that doesn't see war as inevitable.

Easternization is an important book written by an astute reporter for the Economist. It's worth reading, even though I think Rachman overestimates how great China will be.

In Easternization, the idea isn’t so much the doom and gloom fear mongering that I see with many books arguing that the world is making a turn towards Asia. It’s not a Trump problem or an Obama problem, but an every American president problem. How do you deal with a seemingly inevitable rise in importance in Asia without the entire world exploding? To this end, Easternization lays out the very real challenges and risks: expanding China influence making neighbors nervous as the US possibly signals a retreat from world policeman stage.

I think it’s told honestly so that one gets these various perspectives (Africa, Latin America, Russia, Europe, and of course the diverging views of China’s rise within Asia.) Of course, we in the US worry, but for many of these other places there’s a mix of opportunity for trade and growth with an uneasiness about China’s stability and intentions. Any American policymaker would be foolish not to read Easternization and the nuance of future US-China relations.