The Downsizing of America

The idea for the Downsizing of America originated the day that American president George W. Bush declared the Second Iraqi War over. By then the world was in turmoil mainly because Bush had made “war on terror” official American foreign policy. The original plan of the work was a straightforward of 1989, when the Soviet empire collapsed and communism in the USSR started crumbling, the worlds had evolved to the stairs it was in, with the USA opposed by its traditional allies, the UN in crisis, and terrorism rampant the world over. America had become overtly imperialistic but, as events soon showed, it wasn’t hacking it. So what had fundamentally gone wrong? The Second Iraqi war was of course a reckless adventure. If in decades of repressive military occupation, Israel had only managed to make Palestinian and Arab resistance and hostility more intense and deadly, what could 140,000 American soldiers do in a violent and divided country of 25 million inhabitants? But there was something else amiss. America was not supposed to be invading other states on its own without international sanction. This went against the grain of American exceptionalism, the belief that the USA was different from other nations, a part of would history no doubt but also in some exemplary way above historical circumstances. It didn’t take a profound analysis to realize that the exceptionalism of America was to realize that the exceptionalism of America was a concoction of Americans themselves. Even so, was it valid? Was Bush merely an aberration? Were vice-president Cheney and defense secretary Rumsfeld figures in a nightmare landscape? In sum, a book that began as a brief history of the topsy-turvy contemporary world, tuned into an exploration of the thesis of American exceptionalism. It retained its narrative structure and the basic 1989-to-now time frame, but it expanded considerably on significant features of American history: its foreign policy, its politics, and its intelligence services, among others. In doing so, The Downsizing of America presents a picture of a multipolar world where cultural relativism (and no longer purely Western Values) are the norm and, in particular, it proposes the self-evident yet controversial contention that America is one among other powers, bigger and stronger, but in realistic historical terms not “better” in any sense of the word.