The Imperial Temptation of America

'Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America,' by Josef Joffe

Goliath's Burden Review by ROGER COHEN The New York Times: July 16, 2006

Beyond the fizzling attempts at verbal cleverness, however, lies an important reflection on a time when anti-Americanism is perhaps the world's most effervescent idea. "Überpower," as the menacing neologism suggests, is a book about American overreach. But it is not an anti-imperialist tract of a by-now familiar kind. Rather, it represents the pained thinking of an Atlanticist convinced that American diplomacy is at its best when "building an order that would advance American interests by serving those of others."

Such diplomacy, associated with the post-war rise of organizations like NATO, seems long gone. Much of the world now sees American actions as self-serving, bellicose, hypocritical and domineering. That is one legacy of the Bush administration, a government inclined by ideology and the opportunity afforded by the 9/11 attacks to exercise a lopsided power in a revolutionary way.

The cold war was about the limits of power in a bipolar world; an inherent conservatism inhabited the struggle. It ended in 1989, but was only shredded after 2001. Out with containment! In with transformation! And into Iraq! As Joffe writes, the invasion was, to critics, a war "with the United States as prosecutor, judge and Globocop rolled into one." It was a blunt act contemptuous of the status quo and emblematic of "a single-überpower world under the Stars and Stripes." In short, it was alarming.

That such domination would stir resentment was inevitable. Joffe quotes the political scientist Kenneth N. Waltz: "As nature abhors a vacuum, so international politics abhors unbalanced power." Clinton proved much more adept at finessing this abhorrence than Bush has, but then he did not face almost 3,000 dead on American soil.

Any American president must now confront a central question: How should power unprecedented in its international scope be exercised so as to minimize the alienation it stirs and to maximize its effectiveness in enlarging the liberal and democratic world?

Not, Joffe insists, by pretending that the world can do without America. He is no European postmodernist postulating the deliverance of the globe into the benign custodianship of international organizations, treaties and soft power. Indeed, he is bracingly scathing of the chic idea of the European Union as an alternative moral beacon, noting that Europe would not be "so postmodern if it had to guarantee its own safety."

He tellingly identifies Europe as "a postheroic culture": grand undertakings are not for so tired and prosperous a place. "The European Union," he writes, "is fitfully undoing national sovereignty while failing to provide its citizens with a common sense of identity or collective nationhood. Europe is a matter of practicality, not of pride." And he points out that the nearest thing to a shared European identity these days is "opposition to the United States — to both its culture and its clout."

For any Atlanticist, that is, of course, disturbing news. "Überpower" is at its best in dissecting the nature and roots of anti-Americanism, from the spreading moral contempt of Europeans for American capitalism (often, as Joffe notes, paired with questions as to how best to get a child into Harvard) to the "vicious, sustained and direct expressions" of anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic worlds. At worst, this Weltanschauung may be summed up as follows: "It is Israel as the Über-Jew, America as its slave, and both now rule the world."

Joffe cites Henry Kissinger: "American power is a fact of life, but the art of diplomacy is to translate power into consensus."...There are signs in America's recent inclusive diplomacy toward Iran, or nuclear bonding with India, that a chastened Bush may be starting to take a measure of Joffe to heart. Being flanked on dangerous Iraqi terrain by a bunch of Bulgarian or Mongolian soldiers rather than French or German ones does tend to focus the mind...

"Überpower" is a brilliant polemic for benign American centrality, a reminder that America remains a force for good in the world. But it is an unconvincing, often irksome prescription for how that can endure. Roger Cohen is a columnist for The International Herald Tribune. His most recent book is "Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble." More Articles in Books »