The powerlessness of the last military superpower

From Colony to Superpower by George C. Herring

A book on American power does nothing to explode the myth that it is the only country that counts, says Godfrey Hodgson

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 15, 2009

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American media and academia began to refer to their country as "the lone superpower".

The term is a dead giveaway, and one that makes me giggle, because it always reminds me of Oriana Fallaci's classic interview with Henry Kissinger in 1970.

The wily Italian journalist lured the good doctor, never quite safe from the temptation to show off to an attractive woman, into admitting that he thought of himself as "the Lone Ranger", the cowboy hero of a 1950s TV serial.

Kissinger's self-identification was undeniably comic. It is hard to imagine that quintessentially non-equestrian figure mounted in a Western saddle on a fiery pinto, eyes scrunched up against the Death Valley sun.

Even George C Herring, author of From Colony to Superpower (Oxford UP, £18.99), a new, immense and immensely learned history of American foreign policy from 1776, and as fair-minded and unchauvinist a historian as you could hope to meet in a thousand campuses, cannot avoid the term. "The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of a half century of Cold War", he writes at the very beginning of his impressive volume (almost a thousand pages long and full of good sense) "left the United States the lone superpower in a unipolar world".

American beliefs are European: products of the Reformation and Enlightenment

It would be silly to pretend one did not know what he means. Militarily the United States does stand alone. America spends more on 'defence' (a euphemism for military might that is by no means only used for defence) than all the rest of the world's 200-plus nations put together.

That does not, however, mean that the United States is the only power that counts in the world, still less that the world is unipolar, if that jargon word means that there is only one centre of power, influence and independent action. Everything that has happened in the world since the millennium, as well as in Iraq and on Wall Street, shows that the United States has to take account of what is done by Europe, by China, by Israel, by Russia and by many other actors.

It was British and European capital that mostly financed the transcontinental railroads

American railroad workers pose in front of a locomotive

Americans have always been tempted to exaggerate their 'exceptionalism'. Yet historically American beliefs are European. They are the products of the Reformation, Common Law, the English Revolution, and the Enlightenment, and of world events: the expansion of Europe, the African slave trade, the industrial revolution and global conflicts, from the eighteenth century rivalry of Britain and France to the Cold War.

The Louisiana Purchase was made possible by Napoleon. Even the Monroe Doctrine, remembered in America as a declaration of independence from Europe, was a reaction to an initiative of the British foreign secretary, George Canning, which was itself a response to a French bid to restore to Spain her American colonies.

The 'flush times' in the ante-bellum South came from selling cotton to Lancashire, and it was British and European capital that mostly financed the transcontinental railroads. Cheap American grain ruined European landed aristocrats, and drove European peasants to emigrate to the Midwest. Twentieth century American economic power grew because of the

About the author

Godfrey Hodgson worked as Washington correspondent for the Observer, Insight editor at the Sunday Times, foreign editor of the Independent and... MORE