Fareed Zakaria, The post-American world, W. W. Norton, 2008

Fareed Zakaria, The post-American World, 2008, CB 161.Z34

In his book, Fareed Zakaria, one of the remaining intellectually sound members of US international relations elite, explains why the United States will retain global hegemony in the world, which seem to reject US hegemony while trying to imitate American practices and institutions.

His argument is based on the fact that the US still possess the most instruments of hard and soft power in comparison with other states and blocks. This thesis is quite convincing on its own. Yet, it would be useful, if the author actually visits United States. The USA, which he describes is a sort of Beltway fantasy world created by Ivy League graduates, to which few Americans are admitted or even heard of, the world of elite schools, hedge funds and think tanks. It will be also valuable, if he studies European history on his own, rather than from hearing neocon tales of his Harvard pal Joseph Joffe. In particular, his explanations on what went wrong with the British Empire are factually incorrect and economically incompetent.

The leading factor, determining the rise and fall of the states, in my view, namely, the intellectual capacity of governing elites he omits entirely. I remember that in 1970s, USSR achieved strategic parity with the United States, and the war became unlikely. Sheer size of the Soviet Empire guaranteed its survival, or so it was thought. The life was austere but it slowly improved and was better, anyway, than any living Russian could remember and definitely superior to that in Maoist China.

Western Europe was far from being a facade of capitalist utopia, the myth, which emerged a decade later. At the time Italy was considered ungovernable and swamped with crime and terrorism, UK's economic malaise was reckoned to reduce it to the Third World status, Spain and Portugal were only emerging from the horrors of Franco and Salazar era with significant plurality of Spaniards and majority of Portuguese being simply illiterate.

Opposition to Communist regime was tiny, disjointed and suppressed. Yet, any attentive observer saw the rot, which paralyzed ruling elite and the populace. The essence of this rot was that informal structures of cronies and patronage were quickly supplanting Communist officialdom. Stalin, a tribal-minded Georgian, knew that it would undermine his vision and he organized purges once in 5-6 years to uproot these networks by murder and mutual betrayal.

In the new Guilded Age the same thing happens in the US: elections and party machines are losing in importance to cronyism and patronage, the closeness to Bush and Cheney families, plug-in to "Old Boys" network of Southern politicians and uber-lobbyists, such as Jack Abramoff [1]. Certainly, the Tammany Hall, Boston brahmins, Daley machine in Chicago or Louisiana morass existed before, but these networks were local in nature and they did not touch national security. Before the Civil War and between two world wars, the Army probably had its own unconstitutional hierarchies but these did not involve political agendas, only promotion within services, and were quickly undermined by the events.

The present-day American Empire, a.k.a. The New World Order, despite all its military might and technical-scientific supremacy--the latter much reduced from the 20-50 years ago--is not sustainable. Like the Soviet Empire of old, it offers little to imitation and wonder, but its military prowess. As the world becomes more globalized, its elites become more and more parochial in their outlook, forever trapped in the glory of the Confederate South, and newly proletarianized masses (in Roman, not in Marxian sense) share neither goals, nor premises of these elites. As America becomes more multicolored and multicultured, its elite--the Cabinet, the Congress, the media tycoons--look as if they all descended from the same city in Yoknapatawpha County. Behind the glistening facade described by Zakaria and the "Economist," American Empire is a rotten edifice and instead of the recipes of maintaining it, the best minds of the establishment, like Zakaria, will be prudent to imagine the world without it. This does not mean that the United States will disappear. Vice versa, withdrawal from the Empire may initiate glorious "Golden Years" of American polity rather than its traumatic collapse.

To read a footnote, please go to the comment #1