LONDON, 8 March 2004 — Since George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton as president of the United States four years ago, books anatomizing the geopolitical implications of the US imperium have been pouring from the presses as perhaps never before. Nor is there is any sign that this flood of commentary is about to subside. The present occupant of the White House may be one of the least literate American leaders of all time, but in a paradoxical way his presidency is turning into a remarkable literary phenomenon, the source of endless biographies, studies and polemics.With some few exceptions, the books in question are hostile to American power in general and to the bellicose presidency of George W. Bush in particular. When, two decades ago, the then US President Ronald Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire”, few contested his summary verdict on the Soviet system. The notion that the United States was likewise an imperial power of malign intent remained a minority opinion. It could hardly be termed a minority opinion now.
Fears that the democratic ideals of America’s Founding Fathers have given way to institutionalized gangsterism are increasingly widespread. They are the wellspring of the anti-American jeremiads now cramming the shelves of booksellers all over the world. For those of us who would prefer to view the United States in a positive light, it is moderately reassuring that not a few of the authors of those jeremiads are Americans themselves, among them disillusioned Republicans like the sometime strategy adviser to President Richard Nixon, Kevin Phillips. The latter’s study, American Dynasty (2004), is a furious indictment of the Bush family as a long-standing subversive presence in American public life.
Yet even when they are ill-disposed toward the Bush regime, most current writers on America assume that the status of the US as a hyperpower is an irreversible fact. What makes the latest publication by the celebrated French political analyst Emmanuel Todd unusually provocative is its robust skepticism on this score. In “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order”, a book which has been a bestseller in France and Germany and which has just appeared in an English translation, Todd maintains that the US is no more capable of sustaining itself as a great power than was the Soviet Union in the days when Reagan was denouncing it. It is his belief that the prevailing impression of American omnipotence is founded on illusion. As a product of French intellectual culture, with its inveterate anti-Americanism, Todd may be felt to be indulging in wishful thinking and to have written a book especially designed to appeal to Gallic sensibilities. However, his credentials as a futurologist are nothing if not impressive. In the mid-1970s, when Soviet totalitarianism was commonly expected to last ad infinitum, the youthful Todd, in his book, “The Final Fall”, cannily predicted the system’s impending collapse.
In his new book, Todd contends that the expansion of American military power which has characterized the presidency of George W. Bush amounts to a desperate attempt to mask national infirmity. A military colossus the US may be, but on Todd’s reckoning its present leader is an emperor with no clothes presiding over a tottering imperial enterprise which in many ways recalls the Roman Empire in its decadence. The country which presents itself as an exemplary democracy is riddled with inequality and insecurity and burdened by a mushrooming national debt with the potential to destabilize not just itself but the entire global economy. Do not be deceived, urges Todd: In picking on Iraq, a “military midget” already crippled by years of sanctions, America the ostensibly invincible superpower was actually betraying the depth of its inadequacy. The real war being fought by the US is, he insists, much less do with terrorism than economics. What is happening in Iraq is that an uncertain, narcissistic, panic-stricken America is resorting to an exhibition of “theatrical micro-militarism”, thereby seeking to distract attention from its industrial and economic decline and disguise its exploitative impulses. It follows that the present US triumphalism is likely to prove short-lived.
Todd is at his most contentious in his discussion of the relationship between the US and Israel. He likens them to each other as increasingly divided and fragmented pseudo-democracies which have turned their backs on “universalism”, on the commitment to treat all men and
peoples as equals. If both countries struggle to recognize Arabs as fellow human beings, this is all of a piece, he feels, with the ebbing of the universalist ethic within their own cultures.
Denying that he is fundamentally prejudiced against America, Todd portrays the US of the post-World War II era as a force for international good and professes dismay that the actions of the Bush administration are destroying America’s moral authority and fomenting disorder throughout the world. Yet, for all his alarm about 21st century America as a rampaging rogue state, he is ultimately far from despairing about the global prospect. A political theorist who is by training a demographer, he argues that generally declining birth rates combined with rising literacy are gradually but inexorably making for a more democratic and peaceful planet. At times indeed this fluent Frenchman can seem like something of a Pangloss, the fatuously optimistic philosopher dreamed up by Voltaire who maintained that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Nevertheless, Emmanuel Todd has written an important book which not only challenges the conventional wisdom but does so with exhilarating verve and panache.
