SARASOTA — Around the world, a new political stability generated by the end of the Cold War has helped developing countries like China, India, Turkey and Brazil to build their middle classes, and to benefit from new trade that globalization brings, said an editor at Newsweek International who spoke Monday in Sarasota.
The growing economic prowess of such countries represents a "fundamental shift" in world affairs that the U.S. and other western nations have been slow to recognize, said Fareed Zakaria, host of a weekly CNN foreign affairs program and a journalist with resume boasting national best-sellers and many writing and reporting awards.
"We fundamentally don't recognize some very powerful new forces that have been unleashed on the world that are producing a much more stable global system than we've had," he told the crowd of 1,700 at a lecture at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall sponsored by the Ringling College Library Association.
During the Cold War, a massive arms race between the U.S. and its archenemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, fed an unstable, bipolar world that ended with the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union.
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