'Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the US seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.'America faces a future of managing imperial decline
I am not quite so ready to buy into the premises of a person paid to write a column for the Guardian. History has certainly shown that empires rise and fall: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks (or Macedonians as DG would have it), the Romans, the Germans, etc. The fact is, the Americans continue to be the game; there is no real other nascient empire. And yes, there have been enormous mistakes. But much has to do with the change in how military campaigns are carried out. The US has not followed historical strategy in Iraq. If the US had been Rome, it would have marched and wiped everyone out, not carried out a limited war, while trying to establish an internal government. I don't see a contender in the wings waiting to replace the US.
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'American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.
The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan's formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors...
