An odd title for a book, but one immediately explained by the epigraph, a comment of Barack Obama in 2010
“It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airport than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on earth – that used to be us.”
The authors - Thomas Friedman, well known journalist and commentator and foreign policy expert Mandelbaum – are well placed to examine the issue of the potential decline of America and rise of China. Friedman is best known for his book The World is Flat. Mandelbaum has written “The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century”. The book is cogently and passionately argued. Both authors are quick to identify themselves as believers in the American Dream.
“The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America and its future. We are optimists, but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated optimists.”
The reasons are obvious. America is stuck in recession, or at least a period of flat growth (perhaps jobless growth), and China is not. But it’s worse than that
“We’ve seen a country with enormous potential falling into disrepair, political disarray, and palpable discomfort about its present condition and future prospects.”
There might have been a time a few decades ago when the entire book would have to argue this case, but no more. The authors know they are preaching to the converted when it comes to concerns about America, and so instead, more usefully, they identify four specific challenges the US must face up to: globalization, the revolution in information technology, America’s chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption. Their aim is more than diagnosis however. They also spell out what the nation needs to do now “...to rediscover America and rise to this moment”.
As you might expect, the diagnosis is well written and instructive. The two authors - it’s never clear who is writing at a particular moment, but the style works well – explain how the end of the cold war blinded the US to the need to address challenges. They identify – ahead of the US budget deficit mess in August 2011 – how the paralysis of the US political system and the erosion of key American values has made it difficult, if not impossible for the US to react to global challenges, and of course they come up with some solutions.
The problem for the non-American reader of the book is twofold. The first is that it is the analysis of the decline and the examples proving it that is most persuasive and remains in the mind long afterwards. Friedman is an excellent journalist, and he has marshalled facts and figures to long held suspicions about the US economy. For instance, is anyone surprised to read the following...
“Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”
Yes, you read that right – 75 per cent, and this is from a report by top retired generals such as Wesley Clark.
On another issue – the growing wealth inequality in the US, the authors make the point that “Americans have tended to be less troubled by inequality than citizens of other countries. Both the myth and the reality of individual opportunity and upward mobility in America have been so powerful and so deeply ingrained that the socialist narrative of government-sponsored redistribution has never taken root.”
This is fortunate, because as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz points out,
“The top 1 percent of Americans now take in roughly one-fourth of America’s total income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, . . . the top 1 percent now controls 40 percent of the total. This is new. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”
There’s lots more of this sort of thing, particularly on environmental matters, and throughout the quality of reporting and journalism in the book is excellent. There are dozens of instructive stories and anecdotes which the author’s use to make their points. However it then bumps up against the second problem for the non-American reader, and that is the author’s starting position that the US is the most powerful nation in the world, and if it just gets its act together, can continue to be so. They also believe that it’s a good thing for the rest of the world if the US retains that position. Those are two big assumptions.
Many readers will have doubts, and those doubts will only be increased after reading this book. The majority of the stories contained within point in the other direction. On almost every page there is dismal news, either of American decline or increased competition elsewhere in the world. There’s no doubt if everyone in America, and particularly the elite, read this book and adapted its philosophy of self-denial and public service and of seeing the bigger picture – then American would be in a stronger position, particularly politically, but would it retain the position it has had for the last 50 years?
Perhaps from a British perspective, and having learned over the last 50 years that most dominant nations eventually have to accept that their day is done, the historical perspective is somewhat different.
Tom Otley
An odd title for a book, but one immediately explained by the epigraph, a comment of Barack Obama in 2010
“It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airport than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on earth – that used to be us.”
The authors - Thomas Friedman, well known journalist and commentator and foreign policy expert Mandelbaum – are well placed to examine the issue of the potential decline of America and rise of China. Friedman is best known for his book The World is Flat. Mandelbaum has written “The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century”. The book is cogently and passionately argued. Both authors are quick to identify themselves as believers in the American Dream.
“The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America and its future. We are optimists, but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated optimists.”
The reasons are obvious. America is stuck in recession, or at least a period of flat growth (perhaps jobless growth), and China is not. But it’s worse than that
“We’ve seen a country with enormous potential falling into disrepair, political disarray, and palpable discomfort about its present condition and future prospects.”
There might have been a time a few decades ago when the entire book would have to argue this case, but no more. The authors know they are preaching to the converted when it comes to concerns about America, and so instead, more usefully, they identify four specific challenges the US must face up to: globalization, the revolution in information technology, America’s chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption. Their aim is more than diagnosis however. They also spell out what the nation needs to do now “...to rediscover America and rise to this moment”.
As you might expect, the diagnosis is well written and instructive. The two authors - it’s never clear who is writing at a particular moment, but the style works well – explain how the end of the cold war blinded the US to the need to address challenges. They identify – ahead of the US budget deficit mess in August 2011 – how the paralysis of the US political system and the erosion of key American values has made it difficult, if not impossible for the US to react to global challenges, and of course they come up with some solutions.
The problem for the non-American reader of the book is twofold. The first is that it is the analysis of the decline and the examples proving it that is most persuasive and remains in the mind long afterwards. Friedman is an excellent journalist, and he has marshalled facts and figures to long held suspicions about the US economy. For instance, is anyone surprised to read the following...
“Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”
Yes, you read that right – 75 per cent, and this is from a report by top retired generals such as Wesley Clark.
On another issue – the growing wealth inequality in the US, the authors make the point that “Americans have tended to be less troubled by inequality than citizens of other countries. Both the myth and the reality of individual opportunity and upward mobility in America have been so powerful and so deeply ingrained that the socialist narrative of government-sponsored redistribution has never taken root.”
This is fortunate, because as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz points out,
“The top 1 percent of Americans now take in roughly one-fourth of America’s total income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, . . . the top 1 percent now controls 40 percent of the total. This is new. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”
There’s lots more of this sort of thing, particularly on environmental matters, and throughout the quality of reporting and journalism in the book is excellent. There are dozens of instructive stories and anecdotes which the author’s use to make their points. However it then bumps up against the second problem for the non-American reader, and that is the author’s starting position that the US is the most powerful nation in the world, and if it just gets its act together, can continue to be so. They also believe that it’s a good thing for the rest of the world if the US retains that position. Those are two big assumptions.
Many readers will have doubts, and those doubts will only be increased after reading this book. The majority of the stories contained within point in the other direction. On almost every page there is dismal news, either of American decline or increased competition elsewhere in the world. There’s no doubt if everyone in America, and particularly the elite, read this book and adapted its philosophy of self-denial and public service and of seeing the bigger picture – then American would be in a stronger position, particularly politically, but would it retain the position it has had for the last 50 years?
Perhaps from a British perspective, and having learned over the last 50 years that most dominant nations eventually have to accept that their day is done, the historical perspective is somewhat different.
Tom Otley 
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