Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
What Happened to the American Empire?
By Alan Ryan
On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy
by Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 97 pp., $19.95
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall
by Amy Chua
Doubleday, 396 pp., $27.95
The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
by Parag Khanna
Random House, 466 pp., $29.00
The Post-American World
by Fareed Zakaria
Norton, 292 pp., $25.95
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
by Robert Kagan
Knopf, 116 pp., $19.95
From time to time during the Bush administration there have been outbreaks of nostalgia for the days when lonely district commissioners ruled hundreds of square miles of British Africa, and a small number of civil servants and local magistrates managed the affairs of 350 million subcontinental Indians. The explanation is not hard to find: the memory of imperial order contrasts favorably with such recent events as genocide in Rwanda, continuous civil war in the Congo, and the horrors of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and after. The Roman imperium brought the P ax Romana to Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa; and at its height the British Empire controlled a quarter of the land area of the globe and a quarter of its inhabitants. The spectacle of global disorder excites a desire for global government. The target of these longings is inevitably the United States.
Review, 4805 words
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