Was Obama photographed with book about demise of America? Fact Check

A photo of then President Barack Obama holding a book entitled “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria is circulating online, along with the claim that the book describes a world after the United States has been defeated or abolished. Many variants also claim the book is from a Muslim perspective and describes the United States being defeated by Muslims.

MISLEADING

Examples of the claim are below.

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What is Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria?
Why is this relevant?
Why would the President of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA be reading this book?

Obama carried a book called “The Post-American World,” which depicts the world after America’s downfall from the perspective of a Muslim.

The photo has been spreading online for a number of years, and while the photo itself is real – from 2008, before Obama became president – it is the characterisations of the book that are inaccurate or misleading.

The Post-American World does not describe or predict a world in which the United States has fatally fallen or has been defeated, nor is it authored from a “Muslim perspective”. The book focuses on countries including China and India that have increasingly become global leaders in a variety of sectors and are able to compete with the United States more competitively, thanks to the spread of democratic principles and political stability.

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However, despite the assumptions of many who have taken to spreading the photo without researching what the book is about, while the book does describe America’s global power and influence decreasing, it does not predict any sort of fatal decline or downfall, nor does it imagine a world where the United States does not play an important role.

This is reflected in many reviews of the book, below, from the New York Times, and Publisher Weekly.

Now, two decades on, it is the much-hyped “great power shift” toward Asia that will turn the United States into a has-been. At first blush, “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, seems to fall into the same genre. But make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse.
…
Zakaria proceeds more subtly than the run-of-the-mill declinist by stressing American advantages not captured by growth rates and export surpluses. …

When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but the rise of everyone else, readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as Newsweek editor and popular pundit Zakaria (The Future of Freedom) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading.

Even Zakaria, a moderate political correspondent (and not any type of Islamic extremist, which has also been spuriously claimed) describes his book as such –

This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else

The book also made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list in 2008.

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Of course it could also be argued that considering the book does deal with issues predicting the United States’ lessening global power in years to come, it is entirely within the remit of the US President (or soon to be US President) to determine why the author of the book would feel that way.

Given that this photo is typically spread with significantly inaccurate characterisations of the book, we rank it misleading.