Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America

Josef Joffe

Ignazio Silone, the Italian writer who died in 1978, is credited with the remark, “America is everywhere.” To which Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit , would add, “and even more so by the day.” As a journalist from Finland I spoke to recently put the matter, “I grew up with America in my brain.”

To many observers of the world scene, both in liberal America and abroad, this state of affairs is cause for criticism and complaint. Joffe sees things differently. Though German by birth and upbringing, Joffe was educated at Swarthmore and Harvard, speaks perfect English, and finds much to admire in American culture. He is also well-versed in world history, and he has a sound grasp of Realpolitik without which no analysis of current events can hold our interest for long. The purpose of his work is simply to describe a state of affairs that has never before been seen in history: that a single nation is simultaneously the world's dominant military, economic, and cultural power.

Joffe's description of the cultural scene of a fascinating overview. A typical passage:

“Not only is American English the world's lingua franca, American culture became the world's cultura franca in the last fifth of the twentieth century. Assemble a few kids from, say, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Argentina, Japan, Israel, and Lebanon in one room. They would all be wearing jeans and baseball caps. How would they communicate? In more or less comprehensible English, with an American flavor. And what would they talk about? About the latest U.S.-made video game, American hits on the top-ten chart, the TV series South Park, or the most recent Hollywood blockbuster. Or they would debate the relative merits of Windows and Apple operating systems. No, they would not talk about Philip Roth or Herman Melville, but neither would they dissect Thomas Mann or Dante. The point is that they would talk about icons and images Made in U.S.A. If there is a global civilization, it is American-which it was not twenty or thirty years ago. Nor is it just a matter of low culture. It is McDonald's and Microsoft, Madonna and MoMA, Hollywood and Harvard. If two-thirds of the movie marquees carry an American title in Europe (even in France), the American ratio is even greater when it comes to translated books, with traffic across the Atlantic overwhelmingly going one-way. The ratio for Germany in 2003 was 419 versus 3,732; that is, for every German book translated into English, nine English-language books were translated into German. A hundred years ago, Berlin's Humboldt University was the model for the rest of the world. Tokyo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago were founded in conscious imitation of the German university and its novel fusion of teaching and research. So was Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences....”

He also provides us with a fascinating analysis of the negative image held of the United States in many parts of the world, taking pains to distinguish between the rational criticism of America's policies and Anti-Americanism, which is an irrational emotional response similar in many ways to Anti-Semitism. He exposes the demonization of the United States, the resort to shallow stereotypes, and the widespread obsessive belief that “America is omnipresent and omnicausal, hence the invisible force that explains all misery, whether it is Third World poverty, Islamist terror, or even the attack of the World Trade Center.”

One of the great strengths of the book is in Joffe's understanding of the European Union, and the factors that are likely to drive it further and further from world power status. These include its reluctance to spend money on its armed forces; its declining birth rate (which will make it increasingly difficult to maintain its lavish social service network, much less invest in either civilian or military development); and its declining cultural vitality, which Joffe characterizes as “postmodern,” “postnational,” “postsovereign,” and “postheroic.”

This “postculture” he writes, “does not bode well for a global power that would seek to match or top the United States. ‘Soft power,' in the end, cannot do without ‘hard power'—otherwise the papacy would still be a great power.”

We might ask ourselves the question, “Who needs power anyway? Doesn't it just lead to disaster? And aren't the Europeans therefore exhibiting their natural sophistication by eschewing it?” Yet nations throughout the world, from Japan to Poland, from Australia to Saudi Arabia and Israel, rely on American support and co-operation to maintain their sovereignty and security.

Now that the threat of Soviet intervention has vanished, European powers of a former age, especially France, are making more aggressive attempts to caste themselves as a counterweight to the American Uberpower. Joffe devotes much of his book to analyzing this state of affairs, comparing America's recent policies to those of the British and the Germans of an earlier time. He points out early and often that the United States has made quite a few mistakes in recent years, describing the Second war in Iraq, for example, as against the wrong foe at the wrong time, considering that Saddam's Iraq was the most serious enemy of Iran, which has long been the most dangerous and capable force in the region. But Joffe's broader vision allows him to note what it has been that has brought the United Sates to it unique position in world affairs. The critical difference between America and previous world powers, he observes, lies in the fact that “the United States bestrode the world as provider of international and regional public goods.”

America's predecessors sought to conquer. The United States, on the other hand, has produced public goods-whether enshrined in institutions or policies. Even brilliant statesmen like Bismarck, Palmerston, or Disraeli never thought much beyond Germany or Britain. Their purpose was to do good not for Europe but for their own countries. Nor did they devise systems that would transcend the narrow purpose of dispersing or destroying the competition. Previous hegemons were in business for themselves. But the genius of American diplomacy in the golden age [after WWII] was building an order that would advance American interests by serving those of others.

Joffe seems to think that America can find that path again.