The American crisis: announced several times, it is more apparent than real. Here because
It is fashionable today to argue that America is in crisis. We used to see a global superpower exercising its leadership without hesitation, often resorting to enormous military might.
No doubt the overall picture was simpler when the United States had to face a certain but, all in all, predictable enemy like the defunct Soviet Union. Also because, at that time, the clash had a strong ideological connotation that facilitated the division into opposing blocs.
Nowadays there are more than one enemies and it is often not easy to identify them as such with sufficient clarity. Not only. China has undoubtedly become an enemy, but we must also take into account the economic and commercial intertwining that unites – whether we like it or not – Washington and Beijing. And for this very reason Donald Trump insists a lot on decoupling (decoupling) the two economies.
The same discourse, albeit with considerable differences, applies to the very jagged Islamic world, where the atavistic hatred between Sunnis and Shiites among other things causes considerable problems when it comes to deciding who to choose in the alliance system.
However, I think it should be noted that the American crisis is more apparent than real. Or if you prefer, that it is a crisis due to contingent factors, which could be overcome with the end of the pandemic and the reappointment in the White House of a president with a clear strategy in terms of international politics.
Let me explain. If you have the opportunity to visit countries such as China and Vietnam which – at least in theory – base their political and social order on values very different from those of America, it is easy to notice in the new generations the strong tendency to consider the US as a model to be imitated. It may sound unbelievable, but it really is. The opinion of the ruling classes, in these cases, matters much less than the concrete behaviors that young people display in daily life, behaviors that are very similar to those of their Italian, French and, obviously, American peers.
Mao and Ho Chi Minh, while still exalted on an official level, appear distant figures, now shrouded in the fog of history. More important, in the eyes of young people – but also of those in their thirties – is the possibility of traveling abroad, of having access to social networks , of being in constant communication with everyone via their smartphone and, why not? fast food that spread like wildfire.
All this implies a certain availability of money, and authoritarian governments take steps to contain social tensions within certain limits. The collective imagination of young people in the aforementioned nations is literally imbued with Western values in general and American in particular, with the influence of the American way of life making itself felt overwhelmingly in television programming, in standard clothing and even in university education. , in spite of a Marxism-Leninism still imparted on an obligatory basis.
I add – and this is even more surprising – that the same trend is also perceptible in the Islamic world, with very high peaks in Pakistan, Indonesia and in some former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Fundamentalism is undoubtedly important but, on closer inspection, it is imposed only through violence and coercion. It cannot be excluded that, in the end, it will be defeated thanks to the passive resistance of the majority of the populations.
I ask, then, how a country can be considered in crisis that despite everything has managed to spread its values and its lifestyle globally. Perhaps, rather than a crisis, it is appropriate to speak of a pause due, as I said earlier, to contingent factors. And, if so, the "American century" is destined to last a long time.
The post The American crisis: announced several times, it is more apparent than real. That's why it appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-crisi-americana-piu-volte-annunciata-e-piu-apparente-che-reale-ecco-perche/ on Sat, 29 Aug 2020 04:08:00 +0000.