bye bye. we won't miss american pie

Throughout the campaign season, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama alike insisted that the 21st century must be another American century—that the U.S. should continue to be the world’s predominant military, economic, and political power for generations to come. After ten years of shattered hegemonic dreams, leaders of both parties still feel compelled to declare their loyalty to the vision that inspired the follies of the Bush era. Foreign-policy debate continues to turn on the question of how to preserve American hegemony, rather than how to secure U.S. interests once America is no longer so dominant. What nobody in Washington can acknowledge is the subject that this book addresses: the American Century, to the extent that it ever was real, is now definitely at an end.

Henry Luce famously coined the phrase in a 1941 issue of Life. He declared that America’s role was to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit by such means as we see fit.” As Luce imagined it, that influence would extend to economic and cultural dominance as well as political. His missionary vision took for granted that America had not only the right but the obligation to propagate its values and exercise leadership throughout the world. Seventy years later, Luce’s idea is still part of Washington’s bipartisan consensus, but in recent years it has collided with the practical limits of American power.

As Emily Rosenberg discusses in her chapter on consumerism, America’s culture of mass consumption cultivated habits that have sapped American wealth and power through the accumulation of enormous private and public debt, while the spread of the consumerist ethos around the world has further eroded America’s earlier economic advantages.\



Proponents of continued U.S. hegemony sometimes attempt to scare Americans with visions of a world led by Russia or China, but what comes after the American Century will be nothing like that. According to Iriye, “it will not be a Chinese century or an Indian century or a Brazilian century. It will be a long transnational century.”



Walter LaFeber dismisses the idea of an American Century as a fantasy, a “dream” that Luce “conjured up in order to persuade” Americans to go to war.

Politicians still use the phrase “American Century” as shorthand for U.S. global preeminence, and there continue to be demands for a new one. The neoconservative Project for a New American Century—which disbanded in 2006 only to be reorganized as the Foreign Policy Initiative in 2009—is one well-known example, but it would be wrong to see a fixation on another American Century as something confined to that faction of the Republican Party. The dream of perpetual power is based on much more widely shared assumptions that America is not subject to the same limitations that have constrained all other great powers in the past.

Calls for another American Century are closely linked to an emphasis on a peculiar, distorted understanding of American exceptionalism. 

Rejecting the ambitions of the American Century is to some extent “to concede that American Exceptionalism is an illusion or an outright fraud,” as Bacevich says in the concluding chapter. As long as most Americans imagine that there is a necessary link between our country’s unique and admirable qualities and an activist, hegemonic role around the world, the fantasy will persist that the American Century has never ended and can continue indefinitely. The last 70 years have been a transformative time in our history, but they do not define the whole of the American experience, nor should we mistake America’s role during this period for our country’s natural or destined role. The Short American Century serves as a timely and necessary corrective to the illusion that American global pre-eminence is unending, an empire to last, if not a thousand years, at least another hundred

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-sun-sets-on-american-empire/