DECLINE OF AMERICAN POWER?

Gideon Rachman, Zero-Sum Future: American Power in An Age of Anxiety (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) (From the book jacket:"Successive presidents have welcomed globalization and the rise of China. But with American unemployment stubbornly high and U.S. power facing new challenges, the stage is set for growing rivalry between America and China, The European Union is also ripping itself apart. The win-win logic of globalization is giving way to a zero-sum log of political and economic struggle." "The new world we now live in, an age of anxiety, is less prosperous, less stable world, with old ideas overthrown and new ideologies and powers on the rise, Rachman shows how zero-sum logic is thwarting efforts to deal with global problems from Afghanistan to unemployment, climate change to nuclear proliferation." What this 2011 book did not adequately forecast was the rise of reactionary, nationalism, not so much in Europe, but in the United States. However . . .  From the Text: "What Joseph Stiglitz and Naomi Klein put their finger on was a feeling that globalization was a project that benefit elite more than ordinary people. [] The link was a complaint that the faster growth associated with globalization has been bought at the expense of rising inequality--that it was Russian oligarchs, Chinese factory owners, and bankers on Wall Street who had creamed off most of the benefits and used some of the proceeds to buy consent from political elites. [] But while Stiglitz lamented the lack of a 'world government,' a different wing of the antiglobalization movement was terrified by precisely this prospect. For Stieglitz it was the economics of globalization that were open to criticism. But for conservatives in Britain and the United States, it was the political of globalization that were most alarming, They believed that power was being drained away form nation-states by undemocratic supranational institutions acting in the name of economic rationality or world peace." "In Britain so-called Eurosceptics focused on the ever-increasing power of the European Union. [] In the United States it was the United Nations that was the focus of conservative suspicion and paranoia." Id. at 160=161.).