American Power in an Age of Disorder

Barry Gewen

Politics, United States

Washington’s fragile hold on world power has finally come apart.

Henry Kissinger’s most recent book was called, very simply, World Order. The title may be taken as ironic, for at present, Kissinger said, there is no such thing. “Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world order,” and unless the major powers, the United States and China in particular, but not them alone, manage to reach a new kind of accommodation about their roles on the global stage, “chaos threatens.” The outlines of that accommodation are not yet clear, and will require all the ingenuity and imagination of which statesmen are capable. But of one thing Kissinger was quite certain: “No single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period.”

Millions of Americans and, it would seem, the majority of our politicians have not yet gotten the message, perhaps with reason. There is an understandable nostalgia for the postwar period of American supremacy—military, economic, political, cultural—and it is easy to overlook the artificiality of that supremacy, based, as it was, on the fact that the rest of the world lay in ruins. Complacency was possible at the time because American values seemed to be striking roots worldwide. Liberal economics, democratic politics, human rights and respect for the individual undergirded the system. The United States had achieved an extraordinary congruence: its national interests and values aligned perfectly with the movement of history. Everyone was becoming American. The British may have done more to elaborate that indisputably indigenous American art form, rock and roll, but it didn’t matter because rock and roll was here to stay.

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