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July 7, 2004
A quote from this review by George Scialabba of Emmanuel Todd's, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, in Dissent (Sping 2004). It reinforces the folly judgement of the previous post.
Scialabba says:
"The end of the cold war presented the United States with a fateful choice. We could relinquish the artificial financial advantages that kept money flowing into Wall Street even as foreign demand stagnated, American industry declined, and the American trade deficit grew. This would have meant military retrenchment and a period of economic austerity, but it would have restored our competitiveness, allowing for reindustrialization on a solid basis and with a more evenly distributed prosperity. However, we didn't. Instead, after declining through most of the decade, military budgets began increasing in the late nineties. Was this a deliberate decision by America's rulers to go for empire rather than rejoin an international community of equals?"
The US blew it according to Emmanuel Todd. He says that the American ruling class is even more rudderless and clueless than its European counterparts. He argues that choosing to remain a leading nation rather than become an empire would have been by far the better long-term strategy for the United States.
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