The United States as a Global Power

Abstract

Today business of America is everybody's business. If the United States proves ungovernable in the face of new pressures, then there is no hope for a world order. If the problems of racial integration prove intractable in the United States, then the prospects for their solution elsewhere are in doubt. If the problems of developing an effective and orderly system of higher education have been misjudged in the United States, then they have been misjudged elsewhere. No one who cares for the values of a liberal society can wish to see American society degenerate, however critical his reaction may be to various acts of American external policy. There is a confused feeling in the world today that the United States has ceased to be last best hope of man and has become the cockpit of violence, adolescent malaise, and racial tension, a network of decaying cities in which the virtues of the American past have been obliterated, the home of all that is meretricious and corrupt, a selfish imperial power with an unfounded sense of mission civilatrice. Our task is to sort out sober truth from distorted fantasy. Whatever one's view of American society, and no one can know the whole of so vast a country, few people who are concerned about the structure of international society can seriously envisage a later twentieth century in which the United States is not the acknowledged, and indeed respected, leader of a wide group of powers. It is one of the two pillars of the central strategic balance that gives our current international system such stability as it possesses; the nations on whom the United States could devolve a certain measure of regional responsibility, a