The Problem of U.S. Power

The uneven development of world economy has resulted in a disastrous split between the industrialized West and primitive East; but it has also brought another split, at the moment quite as important, between the United States and its own allies. Those theoreticians of liberalism who advance claims for American uniqueness generally do so in a spirit of eulogy, but if they were to stand back a little from the problem and see it in some historical perspective, they might make a genuine contribution. For there is a sense in which America is becoming unique. Even as it is inextricably drawn into the historical dilemmas of Europe and Asia, even as Europe and Asia become “Americanized,” there has developed in this country such a concentration of wealth and power, with so many new attendant values, as to make America increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

Far more than good or bad will is at stake. A kind of symbiotic relationship can be traced: the decline of Europe has proceeded in direct ratio to the rise of America. The power potential of the country, its unprecedented emphasis on norms of accumulation and efficiency, its literal incapacity to understand and irritated refusal to sympathize with the patterns of thought which dominate Europe and Asia—these are factors, sometimes the result of bad will but more often of a multiplying cultural distance, which make America into a lonely power colossus, alternating between gestures of humiliating generosity and crude intimidation, sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved. But the world resists this will; it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own modes of response.

Eisenhower’s victory rested upon an appeal to the imagination of the middle class. He was popular not merely because he was a general; it seems likely that a swashbuckling military man would not have won the election. Eisenhower was popular because he was a certain kind of general: unspectacular, old-fashioned, sound. His political appeal had been shrewdly designed to elicit the vision of a pulling-back from the bewilderments of that highly complex world with which the Truman administration had, willy-nilly, established occasional commerce. The middle class voter who put Eisenhower in office recognized in “Ikeism” the same benign indifference to the idea of Europe or the idea of Asia that he himself felt. “Ikeism” represented a wish to return to the era BC—Before Complexity.

Had there been any possibility for the realization of this wish, all might have gone well. Then, we might have had a little more or less of scandal than under Harding, a little more or less of social mediocrity than under Grant. But no one, except obsolete moralists, would have cared. The whole tragi-comedy of “Ikeism” is that it represents the hunger for normalcy at a time when normalcy is utterly impo...