Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America - Hardcover

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
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