After the Empire

The author who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union predicts that the United States will lose its superpower status in the near future.

The efforts of the United States to sustain its position as the planet's only post-Cold War superpower show serious signs of back-firing. The current American method of operating in the world will lead to a gradual downsizing to normal nation status as the United States' military, economic, and ideological tendencies continue to anger allies and enemies alike, according to Emmanuel Todd. Todd anticipates that American hegemony will wane and an enhanced role for what he calls Eurasia will emerge, bringing together in common cause the world's two most productive industrial centers, Japan and Europe, and two regions of military and demographic force, Russia and the Arab-Islamic world.

A historian and demographer, Todd compiles and analyzes an astonishing breadth of data about birth and infant mortality rates, literacy levels, and marriage practices in the United States to uncover deep trends of decline. Against this backdrop, Todd points to a number of factors, including increasing resistance among the nations of the world to militant American unilateralism -nowhere more evident than in Iraq -and the faltering supremacy of the U.S. dollar, that suggest that the American century has come to an end.