zenpundit.com

Abu Muqawama pointed to a  must-read essay in The New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna of The New America Foundation ( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors). This is a lengthy, grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative American decline and a coming age of superstate multipolarity with a critical “swing vote” being held by New Core/Seam states like Russia and Brazil.

“Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing – and losing – in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules – their own rules – without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Read the rest here.

My reaction to Khanna’s essay, distilled from his upcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, are mixed.  Clearly, great effort and thought that has been put into this project by the well-read Mr. Khanna and his Thomas Friedmanesque globetrotting reportage is nothing but impressive. Clearly, Parag Khanna “gets” that globalization is a dynamic and complex system with interdependent “frenemies”; which I infer that he splices liberally with geopolitics and  the hard cultural conflict of Sam Huntington. A synthesis of civilizational conflict and convergence.

While erudite, Khanna’s geo-economic/political argument regarding the inevitable decline of the liberal international order has been made before (anyone recall Lester Thurow or Paul Kennedy?) in the early 1990’s, the 1970’s, late 1950’s, early 1930’s and perhaps originally in the gripping angst of the Lost Generation of WWI. Perhaps even further, as Russian intellectuals of the Silver Age like Aleksandr Blok were already worrying themselves sick about ” the Yellow Peril” even before the Russo-Japanese War.  And as he freely admits, Khanna’s geopolitical model of three, contending global centers of gravity bears a strong resemblence to Orwell’s. Khanna offers some sound, if modest, advice for American policy makers though the soundness of his counsel is independent of the validity of his thesis. There’s a great deal of glossing over the longitudinal weaknesses of the EU and China and minimizing of  the adaptiveness of America in this essay in order to make the declinist narrative as deterministic  as it comes across.

That being said, well worth your time to pop open a cold one and read it.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Nexon has his evaluation of his former student’s work at The Duck of Minerva

ADDENDUM II:

CKR has an awesome critique in the comments section here.

Dr. HistoryGuy99 has entered the building.

Libby at The Newshoggers takes note.

protein wisdom rejects it as unwise – and I agree that the article probably reflects the geopolitical hopes of some NYT editors in their lighter moments when they are not too busy slandering Iraq War veterans.

Love fest from Washington Note.

MAPS OF WAR

Who ruled the Middle-East? 5000 years in 90 Seconds:

Hat tip to Prometheus6

HISTORICAL PALEOCON-PESSIMISM

Colonel W. Patrick Lang, a former analyst on the Mideast and now a sharp character on the internet, recently put forward an excellent example of a genre of thinking I like to call the ” empire argument”. It is a school of thought, a critical one, that prevails on the paleoconservative Right and the anti-war Left, the the two variants use some markedly different assumptions in framing their argument but arrive at a similar conclusion.

Like the historian, Paul Schroeder, Lang eschews much of the hysterical, romanticized, rhetoric that typify the “American empire” writers and sticks to a much more thoughtful, realpolitik interpretation.

“Jefferson might not agree..” Peter Principle“

“I’m afraid I have to side with Britannicus (and Livia, the murderous old hag) on this one. It is in the nature of things for republics, if successful enough, to evolve into empires. It is certainly unrealistic to expect a global superpower like the United States, with worldwide political and economic interests requiring the worldwide projection of military power, to remain one indefinitely. The framers, with their horror of standing armies and European militarism, would probably be surprised to learn it has lasted as long as it has, despite more than 60 years of permanent wartime moblization.

I’m not sure how much mourning is called for here. Two hundred and thirty some years is a pretty good run, as constitutions go. The framers built well, but no structure lasts forever. We can pine for a lost republic (which, like it’s Roman predecessor, was never as golden as it appeared in hindsight) or we can accept reality and see what can be done to make our new empire more humane and rational than it is at the moment.”

I disagree, first of all that America has moved into an ” empire” state, though I would agree that aspects of our political system are working poorly and that our bipartisan elite are more timorous, self-centered and corrupt than we have seen in some time. That may be, in part, a generational effect of the current Boomer domination of government and the media and could pass as they move off center stage ( unwillingly, kicking and screaming, no doubt). We will have to wait and see if the Boomer legacy is an institutionalization of their cultural narcicism or a reaction against it.

I also do not believe that “imperial control” is the objective of the cultural shift away from hierarchies toward networked structures, as Lang alludes, so much as that globalization and information technology have made hierarchical modes of organization less efficient than in any time since the rise of the state and the industrial revolution. These are fundamental, global, structural and economic shifts that are going to occurr with or without regard to U.S. foreign policy decisions.

Lang however, still posits an interesting argument regarding the health of the republic. Is it remaining in form, while slowly ebbing in spirit like Rome did in the first century B.C. which was increasingly dominated by strong men, polarized politics and civil war ? I think Colonel Lang’s view is overly pessimistic and that the Roman analogy has to be taken in context with the very significant differences between the mindsets and culture of ancient Romans and modern Americans. We aren’t them. George W. Bush is no Caesar or Sulla much as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not Cicero or Cato. Our times, Iraq included, are not nearly as bad as the troubles that ripped Roman society apart.

ARE EMPIRES DRIVEN BY EGALITARIAN DYNAMISM?

An interesting hypothesis by Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz. Reminds me somewhat of Victor Davis Hanson’s belief in the motive force of Western civic militarism.

A topic that is right up the alley of Dr. Nexon and the boys at Coming Anarchy.