#Reviewing Power on the Precipice: The Six Choices America Faces in a Turbulent World
Frank Hoffman
May 4, 2021
Power on the Precipice: The Six Choices America Faces in a Turbulent World. Andrew Imbrie. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.
Growltiger.jpg
“Growltiger’s Last Stand” is one of T.S. Eliot’s best poems, ripe with allusions. It is also a possible allegory for today’s strategists.[1] Growltiger was a large and fearsome cat who became complacent and shabby, ultimately losing his edge and his friends. Eventually, the once feared predator was overwhelmed on his barge by a swarm of foreign rivals while his allies were gone. Growltiger’s opponents ganged up on him and dispatched him. Eliot wrote the poem in the 1930s while Great Britain faced serious overstretch, and the poem’s central character could be interpreted as an aging Imperial Lion or, in modern terms, a declining America.
Power on the Precipice offers a less poetic, but equally vivid, evaluation of a United States in decline.[2] The theme of the rise and fall of great powers goes back to Edward Gibbon’s classic study of the Roman Empire, and Paul Kennedy broadened our understanding in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with an emphasis on finance and economics.[3] More recently Michael Beckley explored the interaction between a rising China and the United States and found more cause for optimism in his Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower.[4]
Decline is a choice for a status quo superpower, and choices are central steps in reformulating the future role of the U.S. on the world stage.
Decline is a choice for a status quo superpower, and choices are central steps in reformulating the future role of the U.S. on the world stage. But what are those choices and are U.S. leaders ready to summon the American people to support these choices? In addressing American relative decline, Imbrie offers guidance and answers for six possible strategic choices, and he devotes a chapter to each. The new Biden team can use this series of choices if it wants to reassert U.S. leadership and redefine its relationship to an evolving international order.
Imbrie’s Categories of Analysis
https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2021/5/4/reviewing-power-on-the-precipice
