The Sun Sets on American Empire

Via Ryan

 

Throughout the campaign season, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama alike insisted that the 21st century must be another American century—that the U.S. should continue to be the world’s predominant military, economic, and political power for generations to come. After ten years of shattered hegemonic dreams, leaders of both parties still feel compelled to declare their loyalty to the vision that inspired the follies of the Bush era. Foreign-policy debate continues to turn on the question of how to preserve American hegemony, rather than how to secure U.S. interests once America is no longer so dominant. What nobody in Washington can acknowledge is the subject that this book addresses: the American Century, to the extent that it ever was real, is now definitely at an end.

Henry Luce famously coined the phrase in a 1941 issue of Life. He declared that America’s role was to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit by such means as we see fit.” As Luce imagined it, that influence would extend to economic and cultural dominance as well as political. His missionary vision took for granted that America had not only the right but the obligation to propagate its values and exercise leadership throughout the world. Seventy years later, Luce’s idea is still part of Washington’s bipartisan consensus, but in recent years it has collided with the practical limits of American power.

As editor Andrew Bacevich explains in his introductory remarks, the purpose of the essays assembled in this volume is not “to decry or to mourn the passing of the Short American Century (much less to promote it resurrection) but to assess its significance.” Each chapter is a study of different aspects of this era of American preeminence, reflecting on matters of race, consumerism, and globalization, as well as reviewing the history of the last 70 years with special attention to the critics of U.S. policies abroad. Though often sharply critical of the moral and political failings of this epoch, the contributors—a distinguished collection of historians and international-relations scholars—are also judicious in their interpretations. The book aspires to be much more than a series of polemics, and it is very successful.

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