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Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Imperialism, Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism
A Conversation with Josef Joffe
In his new book, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America, Josef Joffe offers an analysis of the danger and burden of America's standing as a singular global power. He also investigates similarities between classical anti-Semitism and the recent rise of anti-Americanism throughout the world. Joffe was interviewed following an event on Capitol Hill co-sponsored by the Pew Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Featuring: Josef Joffe, Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations, Hoover Institution; Publisher-Editor, Die Zeit
Interviewer: Mark O'Keefe, Associate Director, Editorial, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
What is the "imperial temptation" facing America?
I would describe the imperial temptation with a metaphor: "Gulliver Unbound." Gulliver is the United States, and unbound means liberated from the discipline and fetters applied to America by another superpower, the Soviet Union. For 40 years the Soviet Union counterbalanced and neutralized American power, thus inspiring a sense of caution in the United States and imposing some limits on the use of that power. Neither side lifted its sword against the other. Never was a single shot fired against the other in anger.
So the book analyzes the consequences of that seminal, transforming event that took place on Christmas Day, 1991 - the day the Soviet Union committed suicide by self-dissolution and the hammer and sickle flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time. End of Soviet Union, rebirth of a much diminished Russia. And suddenly Gulliver was alone. So what did Gulliver do?
He used massive force in the First Iraq War of 1990-1991. He went to war in Afghanistan. He did so for a second time against Iraq in 2003 with an ambitious agenda of regime transformation. The U.S. surely would not have gone to war so close to the underbelly of the Soviet Union while Soviet power was still intact. Iraq was actually an informal ally of the Soviet Union. So "imperial temptation" refers to the use of power without a major, existential risk.
One of your central theses seems to be that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism travel together. How are the two linked? And do you see this linkage becoming stronger or weaker?
Both nations are the two most powerful players in their neighborhoods -- Israel regionally, the U.S. globally. Those two nations are a force of change, of modernity. Certainly, the United States has always been a steamroller of modernity and at no time more so than now, in this age of globalization that is easily conflated with "Americanization." Israel plays a similar role locally, in the sense that it stands forth as a symbol of technological, economic and military success, against neighbors who have failed to keep up with modernity. That resentment is one thing that unites the two "isms."