A FREE WORLD, DEEP IN OUR DEBT:

American World Order: a review of 'The Case for Goliath,' by Michael Mandelbaum (MARTIN WALKER, NY Times Book Review)

MICHAEL MANDELBAUM has taken all the fun out of an ostensibly flippant but fundamentally serious diplomatic parlor game. Usually played late at night when the Americans have gone home to prepare for their puritanically early start to the day, the Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians take a second glass of Cognac and imagine how awful the world could be if someone else were to take the place of the United States as the global hegemon.

Eastern Europeans tell sad anecdotes about living under Russian dominance. Western Europeans shudder at the thought of Germans running the benign and virtual empire that the United States has maintained and expanded for the past 60 years. (And they murmur that within the European Union the French are already being difficult enough.) The Latin Americans have their hands full with the arrogance of next-door neighbors like Brazil without wanting to see it become even more dominant. The idea of a Chinese hegemony sends shivers down the backs of all, particularly the Japanese and Indians; somebody usually mentions the mournful example of Tibet. The Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis react equally unhappily to the idea of India as superpower. As the diplomats prattle on, meanwhile, the British smile wryly and say they have been there, done that and are extremely glad to have lost the T-shirt.

Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, pulls aside the curtain of diplomatic civility to expose the crude and obvious reality that everyone prefers to ignore, at least in public. He explains coolly and clearly the various ways in which the United States now functions as a global government, offering the planet the services of physical security, commercial regulation, financial stability and legal recourse that are normally provided by national governments to their citizens. Non-Americans naturally do not like to admit this, even as they enjoy the results, and American leaders do not like to spell it out, least of all to the voters who pay for it.

Yet Niall Ferguson can't figure out why the rest of the world is so eager to fund its government?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2006 8:55 AM