This is an extraordinary book. I recommend everyone troubled by US neo-imperialism to read it. It challenges depressive thinking in a remarkable and interesting way.
It asks “why America is now commonly perceived as a narcissistic, warmongering bully? How did a country that until recently played an essential role in building international order suddenly become a symbol of global disorder?”
The book has been a best-seller in France and Germany and has now been published in English. Todd’s thesis is that the US is making crass foreign policy decision that alienate the international community, its economy is weakening badly, it’s military capable only of attacking weak, failed states and that the future belongs to Eurasia – Europe, Russia and Japan. He suggests that this linked land-mass represents the majority of global wealth and can work with the rest of the world because it shares a universalist ethic that respects the rest of the world including the Arab and Moslem world.
Emmanuel Todd is a researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris. This may cause some to dismiss him as a typically French anti-American. But he is much more authoritative and complicated than that. In 1976, he published a book “La Chute Finale” (The Final Fall, 1979) which predicted the collapse of the Soviet system. He says that at the time he was widely labelled “anticommunist”, just as, following the publication of Après L’Empire he was sometimes labelled “anti-American”. He defies such labels and tells us he is an historian and anthropologist. He says the motive for writing the book was not political passion but his exasperation as an historian and researcher. In late 2002, he believed that the world was about to repeat the same mistake with regard to the US that it made during the 1970s – reading an expansion in military activity as a sign of increasing power, when in fact it masks a decline.
He absolutely rejects the stereotype of “typical French intellectual” carrying the usual old anti-American virus. He tells us that in Paris his family is suspected of a deep preference for the US and UK. He says these suspicions are justified. His father’s father was an American citizen of Jewish-Austrian origins. His mother’s family spent the Second World War as refugees in the US because of their Jewish origins. He says it was his pro-American bias that caused him to oppose the Maastricht Treaty and see no need for a counterweight to the US. But it is the recent role of US in promoting disorder and armed conflict that has made him become a good European.
His book appeared in September 2002. He suggests that his thesis of American’s “theatrical micro militarism” was well illustrated by its pre-emptive strike against a military midget – an underdeveloped country of 24 million people exhausted by a decade of economic sanctions. He suggests that the theatrical media coverage “must not blind us to a fundamental reality” the size of the opponent chosen by the US is the true indicator of its current power”.
He points out that the US’s huge fiscal and Balance of Payments debt is deeply weakening. The comparison that comes to mind is the crumbling Roman Empire – overextended with excessive arms spending and inequality and disgruntlement at home, rather the unstoppable hyper-power of our imagination.
The book’s anthropological determination is often hard to swallow. Some peoples committed to a fair social order and universal values because the tradition was equality of brothers! He says that the US is a country of “castrating women” and that American Jews have a “neurotic cult of the Holocaust”. He also favours a European nuclear deterrent. Clearly, he does not fear controversy and he voices the typical European criticism of US anti-Arab, anti-Moslem extremism and lack of even-handedness between Israel and Palestine without feeling any need to parade his Jewish family credentials.
I fear that Todd is too optimistic in his belief that the decline in population growth and growth in education in developing countries means that all is inevitably well for the future. He also has a remarkable and interesting thesis on Russia’s future as a nuclear power – which still obsesses the US – ineluctably moving towards alliance with Europe.
He is fairly kind to the UK. He thinks that when it finds its natural place in alliance with Germany and France supporting multilateralism and a more just and equal world, the future will be safer for all of us and that the US will return to its historical commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
I doubt that anyone will sign up for all of Todd’s analysis, but it is beautifully brave and challenging and there are great big nuggets of reality and truth within it.
