By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- For more than a year, America has been engulfed in an economic crisis. It's also been slogging through two bloody, inconclusive wars.

To Fareed Zakaria, it's pretty near the best of times.

"We are living in a world of unprecedented stability," the CNN pundit and editor of Newsweek International told a jammed Page Auditorium at Duke University Monday night. "By historical standards, we are living in a stunningly peaceful era."

That's because "there is no major geopolitical competition now," Zakaria said. "When was the time that was the case in the world? Probably back in the 15th century."

Speaking on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Zakaria dated the remarkable stability to the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989.

Before the collapse, "the Soviet Union was funding insurgencies all over the world, and we were funding the other side," he said. "There were two organizing models in the world. But after the fall, there was only one game in town, and it was us."

With the American, open-markets model as the only alternative, "so many countries are invested in its success," Zakaria said. "Everyone is invested in making this thing work."

And they have, he noted. Four hundred million people worldwide have moved out of poverty during this era and the number of people who have died as a result of political violence is down more than 60 percent.

The author of the recent bestseller, "The Post-American World," also attributed the stability to a number of other factors, including the control of inflation and what he called "the extraordinary information revolution."

Try to remember, he told the audience, which included many Duke students, what the revolutionary technology of 1989 was -- "it was the fax machine. Do any of you even use a fax machine?"

He recalled that when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, in 1990, Saudi Arabian leaders did not want to alarm their people by telling them about the invasion.

"And they were able to do that for several days," Zakaria said. "How long could you keep a secret like that today? Maybe five minutes, and then somebody would get it out on Twitter."

But despite his generally optimistic outlook, Zakaria did express concern -- not so much about the present, but about the future.

"What I worry about is whether the U.S. still has the ability to be dynamic," he said. He contrasted how the nation used to pour money into scientific research and public education and how it does much less of that now.

"We have not figured out how to fix the education system for a third of the country," he said. "We are making do with getting cheap engineers from China and India, and that is not sustainable in the long run.

The problem, he suggested, was at least in part caused by increased political polarization. "We've gotten to a point in our political system where there is absolutely no incentive to compromise," Zakaria said.

"Our greatest challenge is what is happening here," he said. "It is what we are doing to undermine ourselves. My greatest fear is that 200 years from now historians will say that the U.S. globalized the world, but just forgot along the way to globalize itself."