Josef Joffe, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America

Josef Joffe, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America. W. W. Norton, NY, ISBN-10: 0393330141


Josef Joffe is a pro-American German conservative, so when American media wants to have an opinion on German affairs, he is “Germany.” For instance, before the election of Social Democratic majority in 1998 and subsequent re-election, which were obvious from all opinion polls, American media discussed the upcoming victory of conservatives largely because of JJ’s opposite opinion, despite of the fact that his stance was a pure partisan propaganda. He is a smart man, unlike our conservatives, so I do not think for a second that he really believed it.
In his new book, The Überpower, Josef Joffe also says what neoconservatives want to hear: namely, that with enough persistence, things would go well for them. He implores them just to have patience and all their thorny debacles will turn roses—I remind you that collection of roses from the streets of Baghdad was considered by the neocons a major remaining task for American Army― after the American liberation.
His thinking is based entirely on historic and pseudo-historic analogies. But politics is so interesting precisely because historical analogies do not always work. As most European cons, he is entirely oblivious to the economic and electoral part of the equation. American neoconservatives cannot persist not because they don’t want to, but because whatever relics of electoral process we still have in this country, would not allow them to continue unabated.
Yes, Chinese music or Russian films are not so popular in the world as American hip-hop or Hollywood movies, but does it transpire into the soft power of the United States as Joffe tends to present it? Paraphrasing one line of thought of Schumpeter, originally developed for internal struggles in the feudal Europe, the country which achieves economic and military dominance usually has its political and cultural institutions to be admired and imitated, not the other way around. Spain became a preeminent world power in XVI century from a European backwater, and all courts started to follow Spanish court rituals. France of the Sun King replaced Spain in the second half of the XVII century and French music and theater became the model for the rest of Europe. On the contrary, decline of Germany after the First World War and the Nazi rise to power, gave the status of then world-famous German universities a blow, from which they have yet to recover. Early XX century America, which was an economic powerhouse but a distant scientific province, established its scientific predominance as a result of mass exodus of European scientists and huge funding during the World War II, which turned the US universities from the academic backwater into the marvel of the world.
His economic calculations “proving” that Chinese economy will never be in the same ballpark as the American smacks of peculiarly German disregard of a common sense when the normative thinking is involved. For instance, he cites current Chinese GDP per capita as $1,100. Even if he never visited China, just looking at the Shanghai skyline on TV, can he argue that people there have one-eighth of a living standard of an average Mexican, or one-thirteenth of an average Czech? Yet, this is what is implied by Joffe’s “economic” calculations.
Continuing economic and political rise of China and India will certainly have major repercussions for their soft-power status as well. There is of course never a sheer determinacy. For instance, Japan has such an aversion to immigration, idiosyncratic culture and disdain for foreign sensitivities that even in the countries, where Japanese culture is admired and imitated, the real Japanese are hated. American politicians would love to have an empire, but American taxpayers would not pay a dime for it. Every time there is a big foreign policy issue confronting a parochial concern of an obscure legislator from the Carolinas or Louisiana, Louisiana invariably wins. German taxpayers would cash in for greatness; but the peculiar German habit of bossing everyone in their wake made Germans detested even in the countries of Eastern Europe, which are otherwise totally dependent on the German economy.
One of the examples of pseudo-historical thinking on a part of JJ: “The historical Sino-Russian rivalry will continue as far as the eyes can see.” Does it ever occur to him that political rivalries between states are the results of the conflict of real interests? Russian and Chinese Empires coexisted quite well since their historical meeting in XVII century. Big falling out between PRC and USSR, which, by the way, JJ can never distinguish from Russia, happened only once in the 1960s. The reason for it was quite transparent: two largest Communist powers struggled for the leadership in the Communist movement, and by proxy of the Third World. Currently, the foreign policies of these two nations are as devoid of ideology, as they ever can be: where is the reason for conflict? Russia feels threatened by the US and its European supplicants; China wants to regain Taiwan and to build its backyard in the South-East Asia. Both fear the resurgence of the Islamic fundamentalists in the Central Asia. Their foreign policy goals are rather complementary.
Josef Joffe mentions Europe mostly as a whole, again on pure geographic grounds. Yet, there is an obvious fissure between old continental powers: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK-Nordic bloc, which largely follows American foreign policy priorities. Both centers of power are currently involved in fierce competition for the Eastern Europe, with the Poland, Bulgaria, Balkan states and the Baltics gravitating towards Anglo-American alliance and Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary—towards the continentals. Romania, as always, stays in the middle. Anglo-Saxon-Nordic group shares militaristic foreign policies, ethnocratic domestic tendencies and anti-Russian vitriol. Their policies towards EU are to dilute its supra-national component and to tie up its common foreign policy to the American-dominated NATO.
The continental group is lukewarm towards exercise of military power or even substantial military buildup, preserves the welfare state, insists on supra-national functions and majority rule in the EU and, generally prefers accommodation of and economic cooperation with Russia. One can project a split along these lines, with equal ease, as a potential evolution of the EU into United States of Europe with truly common foreign policy.
The book of Josef Joffe is certainly more intellectually sound than the treatises of American conservatives, who are totally divorced from reality. I would heartily recommend it for a discussion in a high school class or an undergraduate program in International Relations. However, its value as a policy guide is nil. His thinking is dominated by the demands of the lucrative American lecture circuit and not in the slightest by his sincere desire to work out the solutions for the world’s problems.