The World America Made

Robert Kagan, “The World America Made ”, 2012, Alfred A. Knopf, 149 pp. 

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post.  He served in the U.S. State department from 1984 to 1988 and is the author of two other books.

I came across a recommendation for this book in the February 2012 WSJ.  The theme of this book is: What would the world look like if America were to reduce its role as a global leader in order to focus all its energies on solving its problems at home?  And is America really in decline?  To the decline, he answers No and supports the answer.  The author additionally demonstrates that, if history is a guide, the rules and institutions that America supports will collapse if America significantly reduces its role as a global leader.  The alternative to American power is not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe—which is what existed before the American world order came into being.

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  In the Frank Capra classic it’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets a chance to see what his world would have looked like had he never been born.  It would be nice if we could do the same for the United States, to see what the world would have looked like had the United States not been the preeminent power shaping it for the past six decades, and to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline, as so many nowadays predict.

Pg. 22:  By 1939, on the eve of WWII, the number of democracies had fallen back to no more than a dozen.  All the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.  The period after WWI showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed but that democracy did not always have to win the competition of ideas.  Great numbers of people did not believe democracy was a better form of government.  It turns out that human beings yearn not only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition.  Especially in times of difficulty, they also yearn for security, order, and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—which autocracies often provide better than democracies.  In the 1920s and 1930s the democratic capitalist countries looked weak compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Pg. 38:  The global free-market economy we know today was created by British power in the nineteenth century, and when Britain faltered between the two world wars, that liberal economic order was not passed smoothly on to a new group of supporters.  It collapsed.  The only power that might have had the capacity was the United States, but Americans were not interested in playing that role at that time.  The liberal economic order is a choice, not the inevitable product of evolution.

Pg. 42:  Continental powers lacking great naval capacity in general tend to favor closed markets that they can dominate with their superior land forces. 

Pg. 82:  China’s 21^st century system is more like the mercantilism of previous eras—Britain, France, and Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, for instance—in which governments amassed wealth in order to secure their continued rule and pay for armies and navies to compete with other dynasties and other great powers.  Today, too, China’s surpluses lead to concentrated acquisition of resources in the hands of the state, which keeps the rulers in power and gives them the ability to project power internationally.  It is unlikely that China would support open and liberal markets in the absence of the United States.

Pg. 98:  The European Union may be a warning. No group of nations has ever come closer to achieving the liberal internationalist ideal, the Kantian perpetual peace.  But the price has been a Europe increasingly disarming itself while the other great powers refuse to follow on its journey.  Would this postmodern Europe even survive if it truly had to fend for itself in a world that did not play by its rules?  The irony is that the success of the American world order has made it possible for so many people to believe that it can be transcended, that American power may no longer be necessary to sustain it.

Pg. 100:  Free-market capitalism is now going through one of its periodic bouts of discrediting itself.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the ensuing recession have again raised doubts about the viability and desirability of the system, doubts similar to what occurred in the 1930s and 1970s.  Other models, like China’s state-guided capitalism, are enjoying greater success, partly because its government’s enormous surpluses have helped cushion the effects of the international downturn.