On After the Fall

This book was received as an ARC by the publisher on NetGalley.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made is fundamentally a book about American identity. Ben Rhodes takes the fall of the United States’s status, on a global stage, as his starting point, and argues we can learn a great deal about ourselves from other peoples globally. Significantly, Rhodes—although he never says it outright—believes that the United States is becoming increasingly less exceptional. Rather maintaining its position as the “leader of the free world,” recent political and economic decisions under the Trump administration has caused the United States to more closely mirror the rest of the world. Instead of being a model for other peoples, the United States has been looking for models elsewhere.

Rhodes’s book is divided into four parts. In the first part, Rhodes examines the case of Hungary in the three decades following the end of communism. While Hungary appeared to be on a liberal, democratic path throughout the 1990s, tactical interventions by Viktor Orbán and his party, Fidesz, has taken the country in a more nationalistic and authoritarian direction. A similar line of thought is used in his second section, which looks to Russia. However, while part one emphasizes the transition to democracy in Hungary, Russia is a powerful vehicle to study the excesses of the security state—something that emerged in parallel to the American security state following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Moreover, the expansion of the American security state allowed Russian leaders—especially Vladimir Putin—to justify taking a more activist, hard-power, role in global affairs. In part three, Rhodes looks at the case of China, which he finds mirrors the United States’s desire to be a superpower. China increasingly has global reach and can project its agenda without relying on hard power. In China, soft power is the order of the day. Moreover, Rhodes looks at Chinese responses to the protests in Hong Kong, which he finds closely mirrors that of domestic security in the United States.

Finally, Rhodes’s fourth section is where he spends the most time thinking about what makes the United States a coherent cultural, political, and social unit. In the past, Americans saw themselves as defenders of the free world who opted for liberal internationalism through diplomacy, while the rise of both nationalism and the security state define current ideas of what it means to be “American.” Moreover, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, American policymakers believed that the world order would be reconstructed along the lines established by the American model. However, in the decade of peace after 1989, Americans were instead left grasping about what their place in the world even was. Rather than solving this problem, which is abstract and largely outside the purview of policymakers, the country began to modify itself towards the global norm. Rather than the PRC or the Russian Federation becoming more “American,” the United States has become more Russian or more Chinese. Rhodes does not believe that this process began with Donald Trump, but he does find Trump to be the best symbol of this transformation. The transformation instead began in the 1990s and was solidified with the 2008 global financial crisis, where much of the world lost faith in characteristically American institutions overnight: liberal economics, democratic governance, broadly internationalist approaches to policy.

While I do believe that Rhodes is right that much of the United States’s current turmoil is a result of it losing its identity in the decade after the collapse of communism, I also find that he does not give enough thought to the Cold War more broadly. For instance, although the security state, as we know it today, was heavily constructed in the aftermath of the al-Qaeda’s attacks in 2001, the United States has rarely shied away from using hard power. At the same time, the jingoistic nationalism that we see in right-wing spaces generally had their origins in the John Birch Society of the 1960s. As much as I agree with the authors liberal patriotism, I do not think he spends enough space thinking about how failings of the Obama administration led to our current crisis. I know there was little Obama could have done with some aspects but refusing to think critically about this seems almost grounded in hubris.

That being said, I really enjoyed this book—it gave me a lot to chew on. Moreover, there are a handful of anecdotes about President Obama that cannot be found elsewhere, and I truly enjoyed reading those. This book will be of great interest to those of a center-left persuasion, as some portions of the book are quite polemical and will receive the ire of conservatives and progressives. Those readers are unlikely to be persuaded by what they find in here, and will probably find more palatable answers elsewhere.