Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/185/1/

Book Review - After the Empire, by Emmanuel Todd (print edition)

By Gerald Horne
Archives - Dates and Topics 2004 – print August


This book has been a best-seller in France and Germany. The author is French and, generally, is contemptuous of US imperialism. This stance is not be confused with being contemptuous of the US itself, as Todd’s approach has been characterized improperly as "anti-Americanism." Fundamentally, the author sees US imperialism as a muscle-bound giant with feet of clay, whose military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere, obscure this decline. He scores the US left and the US ruling class alike for their inability to comprehend this reality. "Far from being on the verge of world domination," he argues, "America is steadily losing control throughout the world." A trend that has been lost sight of, he says, is the closer cooperation between Russia and the European Union – notably Germany and France – which he sees as more than a match for US imperialism:
There is nothing to prevent one from imagining that a liberal and democratic Russia might one day protect the planet from America’s aggressive attempts to regain its global imperial status.…Russia’s nuclear arsenal, despite the erosion in other areas of its military, makes it the only country that stands in the way of America’s complete military dominance.

Hence, he suggests, this sheds light on the recent downturn in Moscow-Washington relations, US meddling on Russia’s borders (Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc.), the expansion of NATO eastward – and all the rest.

US imperialism is a muscle-bound giant with feet of clay.

What about the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the ousting of the Taliban? According to the author, this was little more than "’theatrical micromilitarism’" – comforting the US ruling elite in the strength of imperialism and misleading the US left in the same direction since. According to the author, Washington only chooses to invade nations with populations less than 30 million. (This would exclude Iran, for example.) He observes that the problem with the US military is the army – that the navy and air force are certainly formidable but the army is not able to hold territory, not least since US culture is so allergic to the casualties that occupation brings. The successful invasion of Iraq followed quickly by the army being bogged down in a quagmire of occupation, suffering casualties that have also been hurtful to George Bush’s poll ratings was utterly predictable, he suggests.

The rudimentary weakness of the US is its parlous financial condition. "America no longer has the economic and financial resources to back up its foreign policy objectives. Due to trade surpluses, the real money has piled up in Europe and Asia, while financially speaking America has become the planet’s glorious beggar.…True power is economic power, and that is what America lacks today." Since the Bush team is bent on cutting taxes but does not have the political muscle – thus far – to cut programs correspondingly, it has become even more dependent on an influx of foreign capital to cover skyrocketing budget deficits. The hollowing out of the US industrial base has also made the nation more dependent on imports, particularly from China and Japan. Hence, he writes, "America is not a super superpower or ‘hyperpuissance,’" as a French Foreign Minister once put it; instead, he says, "it is at the mercy of a [potential] mutual understanding between Europeans, Russians and Japanese. The latter have in theory the possibility to strangle [US imperialism]." The euro – the common European currency – is a "permanent threat to the American system." Thus, as the author views it, "George W. Bush and his neoconservative helpers…will go down in history as the grave diggers of the American empire."

Consequently, says the author, like the ultra-left in Italy in the 1970s, US imperialism pursues a "strategy of tension," i.e. "trying to maintain a certain level of international tension," which is designed to deflect attention away from its profound debilities.

"The United States works to maintain the illusory fiction of the world as a dangerous place in need of America’s protection." This militarized atmosphere, he suggests, also masks a stunning redistribution of wealth upwards: "The 400 wealthiest Americans for the year 2000 were collectively ten times richer than the 400 wealthiest Americans of 1990 even though the GNP has only doubled."

This inequality is nothing new, says the author. In fact, he dismisses the idea that the US has deep democratic traditions; to the contrary, he espies a "whites only" tinge to this assertion:
The rejection of Indians and blacks…allowed Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants to be treated as equals. By the same token, the definition of these latter groups of immigrants as equals allowed for considering Indians and blacks as inferior.

He writes, "the category white offered a formal criterion for this [extension of democracy to European immigrants] even as it placed ‘blacks’, Indians (‘red’), and Asians (‘yellow’) on the other side of the mental barrier that separates like from unlike." Like certain US historians, he argues that it was pressure from the Soviet Union and its leveling example that sparked a retreat from the more egregious aspects of "white supremacy" in the aftermath of World War II.

The fierce attachment of US imperialism to inequality, he says, helps explain why Washington is so tied to Israel – he suggests that the US sees a kindred spirit in Israel’s bludgeoning of the Palestinians, evoking fond memories of the maltreatment of enslaved Africans and dispossessed Indians. "There is nothing more reassuring for those who have given up on justice than to see others behaving unjustly…the incapacity of the United States to see Arabs as other human beings is consistent with the ebbing of universalism within American society." He also seeks to tie this tendency to what he terms the "neurotic cult of the Holocaust" that, he says, characterizes broad swathes of the organized Jewish community in the US. The author himself is Jewish and sharply distinguishes what he perceives in the French Jewish community from its US counterpart. "American Jews project onto the outside world a fear that is much closer to home." In other words, he suggests, what is causing organized Jewry to complain about a purported rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe is anxiety about what is occurring in the US itself:
The renunciation of the principle of equality, the rise of an irresponsible plutocracy, the overdrawn credit card existence of millions of consumers and the country as a whole, the increasing use of the death penalty, and the return with a vengeance of obsessions about race.

As he sees it, the Jewish community in France – the largest in Western Europe and one of the largest in the world – is more confident and self-assured than its US counterpart since the society in which they reside is more democratic and less riddled with staggering inequalities than the US.

That this book has been such a huge hit in Europe is bracing for certainly there are questionable – even strange and bizarre – assertions embedded in its pages. For example, more than once the author refers to "the status of the American woman – a castrating, threatening figure almost as disturbing for European males as the all-powerful Arab man is for European females." In addition, China and India – certainly destined to be two of the major powers of this century – barely figure in his calculations. Brazil is hardly mentioned and the entire continent of Africa does not figure at all.

Still, this book needs to be accepted not on the basis of the truth of the matters asserted but more so on what it reveals about the state of mind of a segment of European public opinion at this crucial historical moment. In this sense, this is a book well worth reading


--After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order
By Emmanuel Todd
New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.

--Gerald Horne is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

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