After America
By Paul Starobin
Hardback, 358 pages, $26.95
Viking, New York
May 2009
Empires come and go; in time the world will sail "calmly on," indifferent to the fact that once upon a time there was an American epoch in global history. It is up to Americans to figure out how they can fit into a new phase of history. This is a huge task, full of pitfalls, and it easy to see ways in which the job might be botched. The good news is that it is also possible to see ways in which Americans can make a graceful accommodation to an After America world--to see how we might move on, after the splash.
For Republicans of a certain stripe, Paul Starobin's After America will almost certainly be taken as a literary act of near treason. You see, there will come a day when America--just like every other powerful nation or empire in human history--may no longer dominate the world. For neo-cons, the Christian right and even the vanishing breed of liberal expansionists, Starobin's examination of what awaits America on the other side of solo superpower dominance will be apostasy. For the rest of us, After America is a sober, not entirely unoptimistic look at what the world will look like when America's command of world affairs begins to be shared--a shift, the author argues, which has already been underway for quite some time.
The book is divided into four parts. The first examines how America came to dominate, the second looks at where we stand now, the third looks to what the international scene will look like under five possible scenarios in the future, and the final section looks at America will appear--to itself--in a future with less control over its fate.
To document the rise, Starobin looks to the country's strange self-concept, around from its very beginning:
But as the myth of American Exceptionalism evolved, as it perhaps had to evolve, there was an insistence on a virgin-borth conception of America as an infant dropped from heaven. Part of the appeal of the myth was that, like John Winthrop's vision of "a City upon a Hill," it could be subscribed to in literal religious terms--America as the creation of Providence--or in strictly secular ones--America as a blank canvas in a new era of Enlightenment. This notion of America as a blank slate was a classically utopian idea--it is the essence of utopian thinking to see the entire universe as a blank slate. Founding Fathers like the worldly Alexander Hamilton, who prided himself on his realist thinking, on his appreciation of the inherent wickedness of mankind, had no such reading on the new America as a departure from the laws of human nature.
This utopian brand of exceptionalism was pushed most vehemently in the 20th century by Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine and author of "The American Century," an essay that celebrated and championed the nation's expansion on every front--cultural, political and military. There is a direct line from the Founders to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to liberal war hawks like Scoop Jackson and to today's neo-conservative. And these are the very people most reluctant to change, most tied to a glorious (and often fictional) past and most likely to be blindsided by the future that is bearing down on this country from all sides.
Nostalgia is a form of homesickness, always better expressed as art than as politics. It seeks an idealized past, not the past as it truly was. Nostalgia yearns for the homemade chicken soup that was on the table, not remembering that the soup often came from a can. Nostalgia cuddles up with an illusion. It is a seductive siren but a false one, because you can't really go home again.
... nostalgia seeps into the political arena as a polarizing agent, composed of both illusion and resentment.
This nostalgic streak--embraced by Reagan worshippers, radio blowhards, televangelists and assorted Tea Party cranks--has the potential to turn poisonous and even dangerous. As empires glimpse a twilight, all sorts of resisting mechanisms kick in, from mild psychological denial to taking up arms.
It is often the case that empires are most dangerous to themselves, and to the world, in their twilight moments, as illustrated by the Suez Crisis in the 1950s, in which Britain's and France's desperate effort to reassert an imperial hand in the Middle East threatened to spark a global conflagration. The more America's actual power declines, the greater the impulse, perhaps, to throw around its remaining weight.
For those willing to speculate outside of the bounds of nostalgia, Starobin offers up several scenarios. One is, predictably (and thus least interesting), the rise of China as a sole superpower. He proffers the familiar astounding economic growth statistics and points to the country's deepening influence in other geographic spheres, most notably Latin America and Africa.
A second prospect is the rise of several regional powers--perhaps Brazil, India, China, Europe and the U.S., for example--that would share influence in what Starobin termed a "multipolar" world. In such a scenario, some specialization would take place, and for certain sectors of American society, such a division might prove difficult to swallow, even if it has potential to bring a sense of relief to the common American citizen:
For America's imperial class, accustomed to the primacy of Washington's global diplomatic agenda, a multipolar world will no doubt be seen as a retreat. Local powers will become, in effect, the policemen of their own regional neighborhoods; a power less needful of Washington's help is inevitably a power less inclined to take Washington's advice. For neoconservatives in the Henry Luce tradition, this will be an especially painful adaptation, and the suffering will be felt not only by national security policy mavens at the likes of the American Enterprise Institute but also by branches of the Washington-based national media. I am thinking in particular of opinion media, like the Luce-tinged editorial page of the Washington Post, which has spent much of the first decade of the twenty-first century railing against the departure of countries like Russia away from the American-style diplomatic model. At some point the lectures will cease as the role of global pedagogue assumed by America simply loses its force. The "students," as things are going, are already leaving the classroom, just as an earlier generation of learners did in the first half of the twentieth century when the British imperial model became tarnished.
A third alternative future world could be, frankly ... chaos. Starobin admits at the outset he thinks the chaos scenario the least likely to manifest; it's always tempting though for empires to predict the world will fall apart without their leadership. Or, as the author phrases it: "Empires tend to manufacture myths of indispensability." Chaos, in one sense could be the dark disaster the word itself usually conjures--terrorists, pirates, roving bands of predators preying upon the weak, anarchy, a brute world without law as all societies collapse. But it also could be freeing and innovative.
For those who scoff at the prospect of a happy chaos, who believe that all disorder is basically bad, think about an example that is close to the American bone: migration. The greatest settlement in American history, the settlement of the frontier West, is a profile in chaos, not the master plan of a grand visionary.
A fourth possibility--and the one most intriguing and unexpected on the face of it--is a rise once again of city-states. Think of the world great metropolitan areas, the top 25 or so--London, New York, Dubai, Brussels, Beijing, Los Angeles--and imagine them as nearly self-sustaining modern city-states, with specialties and active trade partnerships with each other. Certainly regional economies have acted as magnets already for nascent specializations: Los Angeles as entertainment capital, London and New York as financial centers, Mumbai and the San Jose/Silicon Valley as tech centers. In such a world, geographic regions in between the great centers would be pulled into orbits and an even vaster, more complex international scene could emerge, with even more players (though smaller) than the prospective multipolar world.
And finally, Starobin suggests the possibility that a true "universal civilization" will evolve as America's power wanes. After all, he argues, to a certain group of people, such a thing already exists. There are businessmen and venture capitalists and entertainment celebrities who already move from continent to continent, time zone to time zone, plying their trades, owning several homes or making themselves comfortable in international hotels. These world citizens, he argues, have more in common with each other than they do with many of their ostensible fellow countrymen and women.
The very existence of this mobile, restless international class and its continued ability to bond and thrive ultimately speaks to the deeper universal truths toward which much of the modern world seems to be trending--at least those parts of the world with citizens immersed in technology. Who we identify with, in the end, may wind up being more important to the future of the world than where we were born, and Starobin concludes this fascinating book on a high note of philosophical speculation about how these kind of identities could shape the world:
The question may be whether calamities like mass famine and the flooding of coastal population centers as the polar ice caps melt engender bloody anarchy or global cooperation. But if I had to bet, an even more important unknown may turn out to be how core questions of group identity are resolved. Am I first and foremost a member of a nation, a city or region, a tribe or religious group, or the global community? That existential question is in flux as perhaps never before--and how people answer it will have a profound impact on the character of the After America era.
As to who will thrive in America itself? Pretty predictable, according to Starobin. "The After America world is most threatening to the Republican Party," he writes, "because it is this party, the party of Red America, that is most deeply invested in the myth of American Exceptionalism."
Happily for Daily Kos, his predictions for our preferred political party are much more optimistic:
The Democratic Party ought to have an easier time of adjustment to the After America world. "Blue America" is much further along than "Red America" in its adaptation to America's waning global clout. There is already a cosmopolitan, secular stamp to the party elite and to the wealthier, better-educated Democratic voters in the cities and suburbs of Blue State America, from Boston to Seattle. A certain type of Democratic voter--the environmentalist, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, UN-embracing type of voter--has counterparts across the Atlantic on the European continent and in the British Isles, as well as in Canada, South Africa, and Australia.
For readers of speculative bent, it's hard to find a more grounded and commonsensical look at the next half century or so. Starobin is a current staff correspondent for the National Journal and a contributing editor to The Atlantic who's spent time on assignment for various publications in Moscow, India, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.
Indeed, in looking at his credentials, it seems he himself might be one of the finest examples of a member of a universal civilization this country can produce at the moment, and in After America, he makes excellent use of his experiences, skills and obvious talent to take a stab at predicting the wildly unpredictable global future.