The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World

Rating:
Summary: A rewarding, but difficult read
Review: Immanuel Wallerstein has some very important things to say in this book, and his thesis (shared by several authors of other new books): that America is a country in a state of very serious decline, dating back to the early 1970's, is certainly plausible given an examination of the existing economic statistics.

Mr. Wallerstein is at his best in the first and last parts of his book, where he speaks in clear, straightforward language, and offers us the insight of someone who has clearly read widely in history, politics and the economy. His analysis of the contrasting spending habits of Japan and the United States (pg. 26), with a powerful illustration to explain it, and the ramifications for the two countries' futures, is a fabulous insight that kept me reading, and looking for more keen observations.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wallerstein's writing, throughout most of the rest of the book, suffers from an all-too-common handicap among researchers and professors: leaden, often indecipherable, academic prose.

Here's an illustrative example from page 107: "The capitalist world-economy is a historical system that has combined an axial division of labor integrated through a less than perfectly autonomous world-market combined with an interstate system composed of allegedly sovereign states, a geoculture that has legitimated a scientific ethos as the underpinnings of economic transformations and profit making, and liberal reformism as a mode of containing popular discontent with the steadily increasing socioeconomic polarization that capitalist development has entailed."

Talking to us throughout the book, with repeated use of words and phrases like "bifurcation," "chronosophy," "praxis," "periodizations," and the "universalisms [that] presupposed the hierarchies of the modern world-system," the author leaves us wondering what he is trying to say.

And the author's over-emphasis on Yalta, the meeting after WWII among the victors of that war, leads to some overly simplistic cause-and-effect statements such as: "The collapse of Communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism...This loss of legitimacy led directly to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would never have dared had the Yalta arrangements remained in place. (p. 21)"

No mention is made here of oil, the geopolitical situation that existed at the time in the Middle East or America's foreign policy under George Bush Sr. and how it affected Hussein's machinations and military strategy; nor is there any analysis of the now-infamous fact of Bush's double-cross of Hussein, wherein one of Bush's diplomats, April Gillespie, when asked by Hussein shortly before he invaded Kuwait, if the United States had any interest in his activities with relation to that country, was ordered by Bush to falsely state that "No, we do not."

Almost immediately thereafter, Hussein invaded.

However, Mr. Wallerstein does have a very topical, intriguing and contrarian argument to make in his book, and one that is deserving of careful analysis: that capitalism is in crisis, and America along with it, and that either, or both, will be replaced or altered drastically, in the coming decades. And his use of "world-systems" as his method of analysis appears to be highly effective and well-considered.

Mr. Wallerstein has done Americans a service by informing them of the very real danger that America is in, economically, politically and otherwise. If readers have the patience and the fortitude to stick it out for the full-length of this difficult book, some hard-won insights and observations, await them.

Rating:
Summary: The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
Review: The originator of world-systems theory expands upon the argument he first advanced in the article "The Eagle Has Crash-Landed" and provides a number of his earlier essays as background material. He acknowledges the U.S. as by far the world's preeminent military power, but suggests that it is a declining hegemonic power. He also addresses, in a number of essays published prior to 2001's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, such concepts as globalization, the West's commitment to democracy, the role of intellectuals, and the conflict between Islam and the West. His final contributions address the political left in the United States and the meaning of "being antisystemic."

Rating:
Summary: The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
Review: The originator of world-systems theory expands upon the argument he first advanced in the article "The Eagle Has Crash-Landed" and provides a number of his earlier essays as background material. He acknowledges the U.S. as by far the world's preeminent military power, but suggests that it is a declining hegemonic power. He also addresses, in a number of essays published prior to 2001's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, such concepts as globalization, the West's commitment to democracy, the role of intellectuals, and the conflict between Islam and the West. His final contributions address the political left in the United States and the meaning of "being antisystemic."

Rating:
Summary: Useful study of capitalism's absolute decline
Review: Wallerstein is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He analyses the absolute decline of the capitalist world-economy, from its genesis in 1450 through its development to its current `period of terminal crisis'. We now endure economic stagnation, political instability and social pathologies.

He points out that there is no escape from class struggle, internally between those for and those against a more democratic and egalitarian society, externally between those defending nations' sovereignty and those upholding the imperial `right to intervene'.

He has some dazzling insights - "The idea that leaders sell out, just like the idea that the masses are falsely conscious, seems to me analytically sterile and politically disabling." But there are weaknesses too, as when he focuses on the `left' and on `anti-systemic movements', rather than on the mass, on the necessity for every country to develop workers' nationalism, to control speculative flows of capital and labour.

Workers are the immense majority in the world. Migration from rural areas into labour markets has enabled capitalists to relocate, particularly to China. But the world is running out of new sources of cheap labour, and within a generation the new workers learn how to organise for better wages. So wage levels are rising as a percentage of production costs, averaged across the world. Also, taxes to pay for health, education and welfare are rising. Higher wages and taxes squeeze global profits, threatening capitalists' ability to accumulate capital, especially from industrial production.

So the USA is a colossus with feet of clay. Its economy is faltering, and it cannot use its military muscle to shape the world the way it wants. Unable to prevail over China and Korea, defeated by Vietnam, it is now trapped in the quagmire of Iraq.

Wallerstein concludes, "In the history of the world, military power has never been sufficient to maintain supremacy. Legitimacy is essential, at least legitimacy recognised by a significant part of the world. With their preemptive war, the American hawks have undermined very fundamentally the U.S. claim to legitimacy. And thus they have weakened the United States irremediably in the geopolitical arena."