How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance [Kindle Edition]

Let me start with what I liked from the book: the observation about everyone being a diplomat of his/her country, culture and/or institution, of the fact that NGOs can be more flexible than nation-states, and the acknowledgement that NGOs, corporations and even single people are important political players in todays world. This is the reality and it certainly should be embraced in one way or another.

However, apart from this, the rest 4/5ths of the book is over-optimistic praise of the actions of said players, at the expense of nation-states with some ideas that contradict each other and present the author's shallow understanding of history or economics mixed in with hopes and dreams of some globalist institutions and think-tanks.

Let me start with his metaphor of "the next Renaissance". His comparison of a current world to a medieval one is not really valid. For one, the trade and importance of non-state players did not start in Renaissance, like he claims. In the Antiquity Romans created a tremendous empire based on the flow of goods from one end of Europe to another, and their sophistication of banking, commerce and politics was really impressive (including financial crises as well). It survived during the Middle Ages, especially in Italy. Medieval world was also no more fragmented than Renaissance one, or than it is now. Renaissance did not end indented servitude, slavery, or other woes of the world.

Second, the economy based on credit is seemingly reaching its final capacity. To advocate the fact that bank can issue any amount of credit it wants, just making sure that it is securitized, is a folly which lies at the roots of present financial crisis. If an underwriter of a security does not have enough money to cover the losses if the credit is not paid, then the whole security is worthless and no rating agency is going to change that. The risk does not disappear, just because you think you transferred it to somebody else. This is a major flaw in the thinking that is presented in this book. Considering noticeable trends of some important players to come back to a currency that is in some way asset-based, the author's ideas seem to be a little out-of-sync with reality.

Third, singing the glory of NGOs, corporations and "philanthropists" is unfortunately possible only by picking and choosing from their actions, and is an excellent study for confirmation bias. For every example of good deeds done, there is a counter-example of the harm done either intentionally or not. To present the issue otherwise is a fallacy. To advocate that they would bring the Utopian New World Order if they were not hindered by nation-states, is a folly.

Fourth, some of the recipes to remake the world presented in the second part are really astounding. Advocating assassination of government leaders hardly seems to me as an example of "diplomacy" in any way. It is also very easy to divide countries that are thousands of miles away, because it seems the right thing to do advised by a few selected experts.

After reading the first part it almost looks as if the good ideas (decentralization of power, initiatives that come from bottom-up instead of top-down) were really a bait and switch for presenting another Utopian vision of the world, which is not a result of proposed changes, just a place where the power was transferred to other big players.

All this also suffers from the one-sided look at human nature, without any serious consideration of the dark side - the thirst for power, the love of money, fraud (praising Khaddaffi's Sovereign Fund in the light of recent events in Libya is really a good illustration of author's bias), racial and ethnic hatred, and all other things that also make us human.

Overall the book is shallow, optimistic, and misleading. It might be important to read it to know that there are people who think this way, and who also have important voice in current world of politics, but apart from that - reader beware.

Parag Khanna is widely recognized as a voice of clarity on globalization among the myriad think tanks of Washington DC. In his second book, Khanna posits how some of the fruits of globalization can be harvested to create a more functional order. As the title suggests, this book has a very bold agenda and it is exceedingly difficult to claim a recipe to run the world without provoking some accusations of hubris. However, Khanna is able to craft a narrative which makes organizations and social entrepreneurs around the world his protagonists, rather than himself as the sage on the stage. Introducing the concept of "mega-diplomacy", allows him to bridge conventional approaches to international relations with the emergence of a plethora of unconventional governance structures that are manifest in civil society groups. He suggest that such endeavors organically create functionality like the world of "Wikipedia." Khanna is most respectful of statesman such as Jean Monnet whom he calls the first "multi-state diplomat" but he is also quite complementary to more familiar names such as Bill Clinton and organizations such as the World Economic Forum. Perhaps in this latter realm, he is not as critical as one might expect. For example, the World Economic Forum (WEF)has no doubt created an opportunity for interaction between the public and private sectors of our multinational world, but has also come under much criticism by the "third sector" -- NGOs. The shadow "World Social Forum" which activists have organized in response to the WEF deserved some coverage. Furthermore, the management of such organizations as well as those led by charismatic celebrities such as the Clinton Global Initiative, have a tendency to perpetuate "group-think" -- a critique voiced by Felix Simon of the Wall Street Journal in his reports from Davos in 2011. Despite these deficiencies, Khanna's attempt at synthesis of global challenges is admirable. His grand narrative would have definitely benefited from greater detail. I felt that this book could have been twice as long and might then have done greater justice to the intellect of the author and his audience. Unfortunately in the world of commercial publishing, authors seldom have the luxury of detail and nuance and that might explain the massive scale of the topic versus the scarce size of this book. Nevertheless, readers will certainly enjoy the anecdotes and insights offered and should stay tuned for more to come by this smart and ambitious young scholar.

It has been a while since I read such a badly-written and miserable book. I could not even force myself to finish half of it.

So Mr. Khanna thinks that people can press a button and take the world to a new renaissance. Never mind that the last renaissance took centuries of human experience, intellectual debates, wars, revolutions and most important of all the appearance of new technologies that changed the modes of production and ultimately dislodged the prevailing socio-economic construct of Europe before the year 1500.

But hey, what would you know, Mr. Khanna offers us a manual, a knows-it-all book of revelations. In 210 pages, the world we live in can be transformed from what Khanna calls a neo-medieval state into a state of renaissance. What does the world need for such transformation to happen, other than reading Khanna's gem? The answer is simply to change the style of the world's diplomats!

Khanna's incoherent ideas swing back and forth. One time he is analyzing the world. Another time he addresses the reader (you) or the youth at large. He encourages them to endorse the change that he "charts." All of a sudden, the book becomes a political pamphlet addressing the new generation.

And since my area of specialty is the Middle East, I was curious to read his take about the region, or what he calls "facts on the ground." Despite his command of "basic" Arabic as per his website's CV, Khanna suddenly becomes an expert on the Middle East. The problem there, according to Khanna, is the map drawn by colonial powers in the second decade of the twentieth century. To rectify ages of conflict is easy, just redraw these borders along oil pipelines!

Generations of religious wars, ethnic divides, the fight over natural resources and inherited social prejudices, the patriarchal nature of society, the abundance of natural resources that have facilitated the rise of patronage networks and clientelist states are all absent from Khanna's analysis. In the Middle East, just fix the region's map and all will be well.

From his website, it looks like Parag Khanna commands a successful PR. He's been honored in many prestigious places while his book has won the recognition of some important people. But when it comes to Khana's intellectual powers, these seem to pale if compared to his PR stunts. Khanna seem to have an intermittent knowledge of the debates over the points that he discusses. His arguments come out of nowhere, and argue nothing.
His book is a waste of time and money!