It comes as no surprise to hear those who have long bemoaned Pax Americana celebrating the superpower’s shrinking presence on the world stage. There is grave cause of concern, certainly, but the real problem is Washington’s neo-isolationist refusal to lead
America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder
by Bret Stephens
Sentinel, 2014, 263 pages, $29.99
Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, there have been numerous books and articles on the purported decline of the United States as the world’s superpower. However, by defining the issue as America’s retreat rather than its decline, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens has shifted the debate in an important direction. Stephens titles his new book America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.
The concept of national decline implies historical inevitability, something so deeply embedded in the scheme of things that, despite our best efforts, it is bound to happen. This version of Greek tragedy has strong appeal in the book sales market but Stephens makes a powerful case that retreat is the right word for the real world. Retreats are manmade. Sometimes they signal defeat and surrender but they can also permit regrouping and resurgence. Stephens writes:
America is not in decline. It is in retreat. Nations in retreat, as the United States was after World War I, can still be on the rise. Nations in decline, as Russia is today, can still be on the march. Decline is the product of broad civilizational forces—demography, culture, ideologies, attitudes towards authority, attitudes towards work—that are often beyond the grasp of ordinary political action. Retreat, by contrast, is often nothing more than a political choice. One president can make it; another president could reverse it. It is still within America’s reach to make different choices.
This is not to say Stephens regards the global disorder of his subtitle as an easy fix. Indeed, the problems are now more difficult than at any time since the Cold War. The inventory is daunting: the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine; the aggressive maritime claims of China against Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines; the unravelling of political order in the Arab world and the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the revival of theocratic Islam in Iran and Turkey; the progress to nuclear weapons by Iran and their international marketing by North Korea, prompting more Middle East states to consider their own nuclear options.