a post modern, post hegemonic USA ?

A post modern and post hegemonic USA is what the world and its people need. And need Desperately.  "America", as the author still insists on calling  the USA, should be a  nation like all others . One that respects Other Peoples and Nations. One that does seek "new frontiers" and is content to live within its own boundaries - without needing to expand on the hundreds of  bases its Armed Forces already have       around the world.  Garrisoning it. Garroting it.    

The future of the United States – and the American experiment – seems bleak. The optimism for which Americans are known comes less readily. While pessimism is nothing unique in American history – widespread since the time of the Puritans – its prevalence today is spread by the realization that the country’s position of global superpower may soon be lost.

This realization, regarded as a “post-hegemonic” fact, is no longer controversial. All empires vanish eventually. Hegemony indeed may be a form of imperial rule – it’s been called an empire with good manners – but that’s beside the point. American hegemony may be giving way to some other post-hegemonic condition. It is hard to say where it will lead, or what it signifies.

Anyone who seeks to understand this history must start with the centrality of dichotomies in American life. It is still common to speak of “America and the world” as though the two exist separately in space and time. This can be traced back to the first such dichotomy: the New World and the Old. Related to it was one between civilization and barbarism. As Jay Sexton has shown in his recent history of the Monroe Doctrine, it did not take long for the two to merge into another defined more by latitude than by longitude, that is, a “North vs. South distinction of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ peoples.” No longer was the United States merely a good poor man’s country, no longer just a refuge and a symbol of hope for those who endure oppression and poverty. It also had, collectively, a civilizing mission of its own.

 Many of the stereotypical adjectives associated with the American character – restless, competitive, acquisitive, mobile, free-spirited, informal, inventive, expansive – would appear to mar the evolution of a modest, quiet country at peace with itself in the world, content to cultivate its own garden. Somewhere there must be another frontier.

In an ideal post-hegemonic world, a vibrant American economy and society would continue to combine cultural inclusion, diffusion and diversification with the kind of prosperity and competition that many Americans embrace. Doing so humbly, as George W. Bush suggested, is not ideal, however: Self-professed humility results too easily in charges of hypocrisy. The US is still a big country; it can afford a few mistakes; it needn’t magnify them by conflation with the national ego. A better policy would be to allow America’s creative talent, sense of fair play and pragmatism to continue to flourish, minus the dichotomies. It is mainly up to Americans to decide if this can work on a smaller global scale and to start planning ahead before their country turns upon itself, irreparably.





http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/recipe-post-hegemonic-usa