Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (Hardcover)

by Josef Joffe (Author)
Key Phrases: last remaining superpower, United States, Soviet Union, Cold War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
While not the first or even the thousandth evaluation of America as the world's sole superpower, Joffe's version is more insightful than many and less unflattering. The editor of Germany's Die Zeit and author of The Future of the Great Powers offers an educated European's vantage point on America's role as the first nation in history so powerful that no alliance could challenge it. While American mass culture dominates the world, our universities, scientific advances, medical technology, entrepreneurial vigor and even our immigration policies are the subject of considerable envy, he asserts. Equally universal is anti-Americanism, which the author defines in several perceptive chapters as obsessive stereotyping, demonization of our entire culture and accusations of moral inferiority. Yet as great powers go, the U.S. inspires remarkably little fear, largely because it exhibits no overt interest in acquiring territory, he argues. The worldwide U.S. military presence suppresses half a dozen regional disputes, allowing potential rivals (Russia, Japan, the European Union) to skimp on their defense budgets. Ironically, the author points out, this is a sign they accept U.S. leadership. He concludes by suggesting the U.S. avoid defying international opinion, and that invading Iraq was a mistake for which we are still paying. Still, he argues, if the world requires a policeman, it could do worse than look to America. (June)
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From The Washington Post
You can tell that Josef Joffe has been drawn into The Conversation over and over again, perhaps more than anyone else, and it drives him crazy.

The Conversation is the ongoing back-and-forth in Europe about whether America is a benign or malign force in the world. Living in Berlin last fall, I ran into it again and again. It may start with something specific, such as (usually) the war in Iraq. But soon the debate becomes vaguer, and the generalizations begin to fly: The pro-Europeans suggest that Americans are by nature violence-prone, culturally inferior, religious fanatics; the pro-Americans counter that Europeans are inherently risk-averse, lazy and effete.

Joffe, now the publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a weekly newspaper in Germany, has spent much of his career shuttling between Europe and America. He was educated in this country, has taught at Harvard and Stanford and has written often for American publications such as Foreign Affairs magazine. His new book, Überpower, represents an uneven but spirited effort to come to grips with both America's role in the world and current European views of the United States.

As it turns out, the provocative word überpower doesn't really convey much new content. Joffe's term is merely the latest attempt to characterize America's predominance in the post-Cold War world. Over the past 15 years, the labels have changed -- from "sole surviving superpower" in the early 1990s (back when people remembered the Soviet Union) to "hyperpower" in the late 1990s (as suggested by the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine) to the Greek term "hegemon" to the overworked literary metaphors (Leviathan, Gulliver). Take your pick.

In fact, Joffe's title is misleading. It seems to suggest that Joffe has written a denunciation of American power. In fact, the book leans in the opposite direction. Joffe does criticize the U.S. intervention in Iraq with considerable cogency, but this is done almost in passing. On the whole, he's sympathetic to American policies and culture, offering instead only some advice on how Washington could better handle its predominant position in international affairs. (Don't rely so heavily on the military, Joffe tells us -- a prescription that is certainly wise but hardly new.)

Meanwhile, Joffe is scornful of European attitudes toward the United States. In fact, his long, trenchant descriptions of anti-Americanism in Europe are what make this book worth reading. In one section entitled "Policy Anti-Americanism versus the Real Thing," he carefully differentiates between legitimate opposition to particular American policies (on, say, Iraq, Iran or Israel) and sweeping European efforts to stereotype the United States as morally deficient or socially and culturally retrograde.

At one point, drawing on his own experiences, Joffe reduces European debates about the United States to a single composite conversation: a long, hilarious exchange between a pro-American X and an anti-American Y. An excerpt:

"Y: Just look at [American] TV.

"X: And we [Europeans] don't have reality TV, soaps, and afternoon talk shows that deal with sexual perversions?

"Y: These are all American imports, which they are inflicting on us.

"X: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire is a British and Big Brother a Dutch invention.

"Y: (escaping into circularity): This just goes to show how much American vulgarity has seeped into European sensibilities.

"X: What about the inundation of European TV with hard-core porn movies and telephone-sex ads, which are strictly homemade.

"Y: (shifting ground again): Americans are too Puritan to confront sex honestly."

Joffe perceptively traces the recent history of the European-American divide. He does not fall into the trap of believing that everything started in 2003, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or in 2001, when George W. Bush took office. In fact, the best single turn of phrase in the book is Joffe's description of the Clinton administration's worldview in the 1990s: He calls it "soft triumphalism," as opposed to the current administration's hard-edged version. Europe, lest we forget, wasn't wild about the earlier version either.

Unfortunately, Überpower bogs down when Joffe tries to derive strategic lessons from the last several hundred years of European history and the continent's shifting balance of power. For European writers in America, this is a black hole to be avoided; Joffe falls into it and never quite finds his way out. The last third of his book offers few new insights. Joffe informs us, for example, that the European Union is hampered by its unelected bureaucracy, that the Middle East's only exports are oil and terrorism, and that China is the only rising power that might some day challenge the United States. Few readers will find any of this surprising.

Nevertheless, Joffe's book usefully illuminates how America is used as a political symbol in Europe and, by extension, elsewhere in the world. He observes, for example, that former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder railed against the United States in his political campaigns but, once in office, sought to nudge the German economy toward American-style economic and social reforms (cutting welfare rolls, for example). "The chancellor denounced the United States while emulating it, setting up the country as a convenient scapegoat (and smoke screen) for the harsh policies enacted by him," Joffe writes. "Freud would clap his hands over such a vivid instance of projection." Several other books have delineated the long history of anti-Americanism in Europe, but none has described the phenomenon in its current form so well.

Reviewed by James Mann
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1 edition (June 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061353
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061352
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #501,861 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Keeping America on top, June 9, 2006

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Joffe is one of the most respected and most pro- American European intellectuals. Editor of a major German newspaper he also studied at a number of American universities and knows the society well. In this work he looks at the US largely in terms of its relationship to Europe.He is a defender of the US and concerned about its preserving its position as dominant world power.
As Brad Stephens writes in 'Commentary' " He devotes much of Überpower to tallying up the "objective" political, economic, military, and cultural strengths of the U.S. vis-à-vis its current and prospective competitors.
This approach is not without its benefits, not least because Joffe, cutting against the grain of much conventional wisdom, underscores just how weak America's competitors are. Beijing? Even if China's gross domestic product were to keep doubling every decade--historically an unprecedented feat--Joffe calculates that it would only reach parity with current U.S. GDP in 30 years. Moscow? Russia's population shrinks every year by 0.5 percent, hardly a sign of national vitality."
Moreover the European Union despite being fifty - percent larger in population is no real match for the U.S. especially as its own citizens have minimal loyalty to it.
Stephens points out that Joffe recommends the US maintain a policy of balancing and bonding , of warding off enemies and making new friends that will enable it to strengthen its position.
However Stephens criticizes Joffe for ignoring many of the dangers facing the world today, including the possibility of a radical Islamic nuclear strike. He points otu that is that Joffee does not really consider the full range of threats America faces.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Handbook of Superpower Etiquette, July 19, 2006

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

While it is a truism that certain nations are more powerful than others, never has the post-Westphalian balance of power been more lopsided than today. The political, economic, cultural, and military resources of the United States outweigh all other nations and even any imaginable alliance of nations. Being the uberpower, however, it not all that it is made out to be, as Josef Joffe points out in this book.

As an editor and publisher of the high-brow German newspaper "Die Zeit" and as German Jew educated in America, Joffe occupies a unique position to counsel on superpower conduct.

During the postwar years of bipolar superpower rivalry, the Europeans derived comfort from the stability it afforded, but with the demise of the Soviet Union, the Europeans are starting to feel uneasy with the new uberpower - or hyperpuissance as former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine would say. The current balancing of power in Europe is putting the United States on one side and everyone else on the other, not to mention the fact that it is also giving rise to anti-Americanism. Joffe, who is a "realist" thinker on international affairs, tells us this is natural occurence in the balancing of global power relations.

The Iraq war was a case in point. It was not so much an issue of Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction that caused France, Germany, Russia, and China thwart US efforts, it was the fact that the US was undertaking a war of choice. (Afghanistan was seen as a war of self-defence.) It looked to them as an attempt an attempt to control the world's oil supplies, making the superpower even more powerful. Joffe correctly and sympathetically notes that if the war had been only about oil, the US could easily have made a deal with Saddam and gotten all the oil it needed, and at a much better price.

The European anti-Americanism that Joffe speaks of is only partially due to America's outsized power, it is also, he claims, about a certain European insecurity and sense of powerlessness. This is where Joffe plays psychotherapist and puts the Europeans on the couch. He goes through and refutes an entire list of reasons why they think America is morally deficient, and socially and culturally retrograde. This is probably the best part of the book.

In Joffe's view, America will be the undisputed superpower in the foreseeable future, neither China, Russia, nor the European Union will come close in the years ahead.

His advice for superpower conduct is very similar to that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, another foreign policy realist. As Brzezinski pointed out in "The Choice", a superpower can undertake unilateral action, but it cannot succeed without building consensus and alliances. The realist school argues that we should be more concerned about great power alliances and stability rather than the internal nature of the regimes. This practice, however, was discredited after 9/11 when confronted by a non-state actor (Osama bin Laden) operating from a failed state (Afghanistan).

The main problem with this book is that it is Atlanticist. There is little mention of the world outside of the US and Europe. China now has the world's third largest economy, and with the price of oil over $70 a barrel new regional powers and alliances are forming. Also, Joffe's account of superpower etiquette fails to explain why the tried and the true realist policies were abandoned after 9/11.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gets beyond cliches, July 6, 2006

By	John - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

There is so much cliched writing about Europe and the U.S., along the lines of: "the French can't be trusted", "America wants to take over the world", etc. In a time of Michael Moore-type books, it is nice to see that there are writers out there who really can think originally and deeply about the U.S. and Europe, beyond all the cliches. One example that comes to mind is the discussion in Joffe's book about American culture: whereas European films are mostly stuck in twisted complex "introspective" themes, American Hollywood films still dare to delve into "big" themes: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc. Good point, and this book is full of them. Most European thinkers totally miss points like this. The "naive" Americans make films like "Titanic" and Bruce Willis movies with a hero (horrors !), and the masses of Europeans flock to them and watch them. Why ? Because they are open and honest enough to have these types of themes, unlike most European movies, which dance around some kind of navel-gaving introspection. Europeans claim to hate American culture, but yet, as Joffe points out, U.S. culture is everywhere in Europe (I was in Germany in the fall of 2005, and saw more and more English signs, for example: "Call Center", "City Card", etc.. Europeans claim to dislike America, but their kids eat at McDonalds, and watch Angelina Jolie films, and use I-pods to listen to American jazz and hip-hop and pop music. When pressed, Europeans will admit that what they hate is the freedom and the vast choices that American culture gives the world (would you want to use European computers without the graphical user interface and mouse and all the other stuff invented in America ?). I lived in Germany for 8 years, so this is not new to me, but the author does a great job at highlighting this. And the English and French disdain military power these days, as the author points out, not because they are against military force (the French militarily intervened 47 times in Africa without UN mandate, since 1945, to give just one example), but because only the U.S. is able to do it in the 21st century. No other nation can "project power" so well as the U.S., and instead of the French and Brits saying that they just resent the U.S. being so powerful and having taken their place on the world stage, what they do is say that they disdain "military force", and that the "UN should solve all problems". This is a very good book that to me highlighted European hypocrisy, while at the same time warning the U.S. from turning too arrogant.