Uberpower contains 7 chapters: 2 that describe the United States’ status as the last remaining superpower, 2 about the rise of sentiments for and against the US, and 3 that describe possible solutions. The first two chapters are informative, and then everything goes to hell in the second pair of chapters, leaving the remaining 3 chapters suspect.

I went over the edge in chapter 4, “The Rise of Americanism.” Joffe claims that there has recently been a surge in anti-Americanism, driven by a surge in Americanism. He uses Google searches for “anti-Americanism 2004″ to measure the “sudden surge” in anti-Americanism. He writes:

When “anti-Americanism” followed by a particular year was entered, there were 180,000 entries for 2004. . . . For the 1970s, the average was 12,000, as it was for the 1960s and in the year 1950. (p. 97)

But if we search Google for just “2004,” we get 7,970,000,000 results, but only 284,000,000 for “1950.” This means that if we normalize Joffe’s results to account for the number of pages Google indexes containing the years 2004 and 1950, the phrase anti-Americanism is less commonly used with 2004 than 1950. Joffe says that his survey is “only suggestive.” Even if we could be sure that webpage mentions corresponded to public opinion, which is doubtful, his survey would be “suggestive” of the opposite of what he concludes. After reading this section, the rest of his conclusions were suspect.

Later in the book, Joffe quotes John Winthrop as referring to America in a sermon as a “cittie upon a hill with the eies of all people upon them” (p. 108). Later, he quotes Winthrop again, but this time he writes “the eyes of all people uppon us” (pp. 240-241). Is he making this up? Throwing in funny spellings to liven things up? Is he this careless with the rest of his quotations?
Talking about the spread of American clothing styles around the world, Joffe writes, “Among the even younger set, the bulky pants of street surfboarders became de rigeur almost instantly . . .” (p. 99). I believe that I am one of the street surfboarders, a member of the even younger set that Joffe mentions, but I do not consider anything de rigeur. I get the feeling that Joffe experiences youth culture like my parents: “Let’s all wear novelty t-shirts to the teen center! Don’t wear that ballcap backwards– it’s disrespectful!”

In the concluding chapter of the book, Joffe summarizes his recommendation for US policy (which was the reason I wanted to read the book– how do we get ourselves out of this mess?). He writes, “Briefly: the United States will have to balance and to bond in order to extend its lease on the top floor of international politics” (p. 210). Ignoring the metaphor blighting the end of the sentence (I know, you Thomas-Friedman-reading Americans don’t care), that’s an interesting thesis, if you’ve read chapters 5 and 6 where Joffe summarizes what he means by balancing and bonding. Unfortunately, the rest of his book undermines his reliability.
I freely admit that I don’t know much about, for example, the military history of Europe; I have read zero works by Carl von Clausewitz, and Joffe’s summary of the downfall of Bismarck was the most I’ve read on the topic. This is why I read books by experts in fields with which I’m unfamiliar– I’m hoping to learn from their wisdom. My fields of expertise (spelling, Google, high school statistics, street surfboarding) and Joffe’s don’t overlap very much, but where they do, Joffe looks terrible.

I guess I’ll stick with Wikipedia– the authors might not all have Ph. D.’s, but at least they know how to use Google.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Book Review, Foreign affairs, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.