| ID | 111591 |
| Title Proper | No class! a comment on Simon Bromley's American power and the prospects for international order |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Colas, Alejandro |
| Publication | 2012. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | This intervention argues that Bromley's account of American power underplays some of the structural weaknesses in the US-made liberal order. These weaknesses are not principally the result of relative economic decline, but chiefly the product of a political insistence among US ruling classes in getting their own way (that is, for the immediate American interests to prevail) regardless of their longer-term socio-economic or political consequences. It is the quest for American primacy, not the pursuit of a liberal international order that is the chief driver of US external relations. Likewise it is the more volatile dynamics of class antagonism and alliances both within and outside the USA-not the rational calculation of states as Bromley suggests-that tend to determine the success or failure of American primacy. I flesh out these claims by looking successively at the ideology of post-war American Empire, the contradictions of its actual implementation and the forms of socio-economic and political instability it generates. Bromley's sanguine view of the future of liberal order, it is argued, is only persuasive with a very narrow, inter-statist conception of world order and one which therefore underestimates the social origins of geopolitical disorder. |
| `In' analytical Note | Cambridge Review of International Affairs Vol. 25, No.1; Mar 2012: p.39-52 |
| Journal Source | Cambridge Review of International Affairs Vol. 25, No.1; Mar 2012: p.39-52 |
| Key Words | American Power ; Liberal International Order ; Geopolitics ; United States |