The US global hegemony will end one day, but there’s life in the old dog yet, says andrew roberts |
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Woe is America; all is doom! The phenomenally bright Indian-born (I only mention it because he makes a lot of it in this book) editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, is set fair to be the Cassandra of American might. Hubris has overcome his adopted land, he thinks, and nemesis cannot be far behind.
With China and India principally, and Russia, South Africa and Brazil potentially, coming up behind the United States, the days of American global hegemony are numbered, he argues. President George W Bush is, he thinks, primarily at fault in the short-term, but there's also a systemic problem. In Zakaria's diagnosis, America's 'dysfunctional political system is unable to make adjustments' to preserve her (over-mighty) world primacy.
It's a pretty gloomy analysis from the man who is advising John McCain on foreign policy, but fortunately for the dwindling band of
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pro-Americans such as me, it is shot through with assumptions that don't stack up. Yes eventually, in the words of the hymnal, 'All proud empires pass away,' but America's time of reckoning is still far off.
For all that China has enjoyed an 11 per cent growth rate last year, it has 7.7 per cent inflation and 18 per cent fuel price rises in the same period. If Washington's is a "dysfunctional political system", how would one characterize Russia's, which is anyhow an entirely energy-based economy? Brazil and South Africa might well dominate their own continents, but are either of them genuinely set fair to challenge the US even in the long term?
When Zakaria considers what he calls "the American problem", has he really factored in Beijing's coming problem when billions of aspiring bourgeois Chinese sooner or later start to demand the political freedoms and legal safeguards that have always gone with economic power, but which cannot be delivered by authoritarian laissez-faire centralism?
If anywhere is likely to dislodge America 
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Capitalism has won: we just can't admit it
An American's home is his arsenal
