American Pastoral

The decline of America is a bit of a bore, but it keeps coming in varying shades of ideology. The Left is gleeful; the death—or the fall—of the Imperium is worthy of a rotgut vodka toast. The Right is disenchanted; an empire in denial is a repudiation of a historical responsibility. Forget the exaggerations, the life of America as a superpower continues to bring out the Cassandras in academia as well as in the media. Maybe it has something to do with the way America has conducted itself in the post-Berlin Wall World. Maybe ‘the end of history’—or the triumph of liberal democracy—has not resulted in the winner making use of the victory. Or maybe when America really made use of it, as George W Bush did in the aftermath of 9/11, it could not strike a balance between the morality and the responsibility of intervention. Just to be politically incorrect: Wouldn’t it have been better if Bush, in retrospect, had done a bit of nation building as well in Iraq? The Bush way did not acquire the nobility of, say, the Wilsonian way, and that was to some extent the failure of neo-conservatism in action. The running dogs of imperialism are in retreat—or on the defensive.

So, are we witnessing the fin of the American siècle? The question is being repeated in the context of the resurgent Asian century, which is powered by the ‘controlled’ China and the ‘democratic’ India. It gets an added resonance in the age of Barack Obama, the president of cool realism, and who, as candidate or as president, has never been a votary of American exceptionalism. An America, as leader of the free world, reaching out to the areas of unfreedom is not his kind of America. Let them bleed, he will not get entangled. The image of an America that is smaller than its historical size, steeped in its own little domestic struggles, is starker now, and the president of detachment is at home in this place. The decline is inevitable, and we are condemned to read more of it.

That is why, amidst this gathering pessimism, Is the American Century Over? by Joseph S Nye Jr (Polity Press) is an argument that stands out. Joe Nye is an American guru, and he has given us the term ‘soft power’. This slim volume is a persuasive repudiation of all those obituaries on American supremacy. He is not particularly worried about the prospect of China becoming the world’s top economy within a decade. ‘Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcome one wants, and there are three ways to do that: by coercion (sticks); by payments ( carrots); and by attraction or persuasion. Sticks and carrots are forms of hard power. All these dimensions of power are important, and that is why economic power alone should not be used to define the American century,’ he writes. And that is why the Chinese century is still wishful thinking, for the rising People’s Republic is not at peace with itself—the management of stability is a permanent political struggle for it.

Joe Nye’s ‘guess is that among the range of possible futures, one in which a new challenger such as Europe, Russia, India, Brazil, or China surpasses the United States and precipitates the end of the American centrality to the global balance of power are not impossible, but not very likely’. Pre-eminence today is maintained not by the colonies you control but the alliances you manage, and here, America is still unbeatable. America is not Rome yet—let the Gibbons wait—because, as Joe Nye argues, in terms of military, economic and soft power, the challengers have not only not surpassed the United States but not succeeded in winning their own battles at home. They have not fully empowered themselves—or acquired enough allies internationally—to shift the balance of power. What America needs to do in the 21st century is to change its ideas of leadership, which, Joe Nye says, ‘is not the same as domination. America will have to listen in order to get others to enlist in… a multipartner world’.

Has the professor written that line for Obama? He was not a good listener when the Arab street called. Is he really listening to the call of history from somewhere in the sandy remoteness of Syria? Is he underestimating the ‘evil’ of the Islamic State? In his last months in the White House, Obama is in the midst of the crisis that confronts all last-term presidents: the legacy crisis. Haven’t we got tired of comparing Candidate Obama with President Obama? The former was a revolution; the latter, restraint. The candidate was America’s romance with history; the president is America’s withdrawal from history. Is the nuclear deal with Iran—not a deal yet technically—then his last-ditch effort to regain history? An Iran forgoing the bomb option, making peace with the Great Shaitan, is a big deal. Still, it’s Obama who wants this deal more than the ayatollahs, for the president of reconciliation, an ideal the world celebrated in the inaugural days of Obama, cannot let history slip by him. He is too smart a man to allow that, and not many days are left for the president to redeem the Prize forced on him by the Nobel Committee.

Even Barack Obama does not want to retire to a post- American world.

AmericaBarack ObamaIs the American Century Over?Joseph S Nye JrSyria