After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

This is a very different view by a French intellectual who anticipated the fall of the Berlin wall nearly 20 years ago. His basic contention is that 'at the very moment when the world is discovering democracy and learning to get along politically without the United States, the United States is beginning to lose its democratic characteristics and is discovering that it cannot get along without the rest of the world'. An example of the US's growing dependency can be found in the increase of its foreign trade deficit from 100 to 450 billion dollars during the 1990s. Todd understands the politics of this equation but has less to say about the nature of the US position as reserve currency that enables it to run such a deficit, which, interestingly, is roughly equivalent to its military expenditure. He rightly states that its fundamental strategic objective is political control of the world's resources, and he also points out that every step taken to extend control creates new problems, a feature of complex systems that has so far eluded the administration. Moreover, Todd does not think that its power is sufficient to maintain the current levels of exploitation of the planet, nor is its ideological universalism up to the task of long-term empire. This is a sophisticated analysis but I think that Todd underplays the impact of ecological degradation on the politics of the next 50 years.