Usa Facing to Challenge for the Future: Domination or Cooperation? the Final Choice

Volume 3 - Issue 2

Fabrizio Pezzani*

Received: October 29, 2019;   Published: November 12, 2019

DOI: 10.32474/SJPBS.2019.03.000159

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Abstract

The path we have attempted to describe briefly in the previous pages shows the evolution of a society that no longer seems able to make head or tail of what is going on in a moment of great difficulty. An incredulous society faced with facts it fails to understand but that it seems incapable of questioning. It remains locked in an ideological impasse between the return to ancient glories and ostentation of the past, and the idea that instead a new road must be found at the end of a journey that has come to a dead-end. So it is driven towards a form of “compulsion to repeat in a regressive manner”. In 1949 British historian A. J. Toynbee in his book entitled Civilization on Trial made the point that an individual’s character (and I would say also human society’s) is always forged by having to face setbacks and obstacles. However, the toughest situations are those that arise in the middle of fortunate, prosperous periods that people fatuously believe can never end. In such situations people, fighting with destiny, give in to the temptation of looking for scapegoats who will bear the burden of their own incompetence. But trying to saddle someone else with one’s own responsibilities in hard times is even more dangerous than believing in everlasting prosperity. Toynbee postulated that the real challenge at that time came from Western society’s enormous technical progress that made it the master of non-human nature. It was indeed this magnificent advance in the knowledge of “secrets” that had illuded the past generation to the point of daydreaming that conveniently history had come full circle [1-4].
The extremely perspicacious Toynbee already saw the risk of a decline of our society. Much water has passed under the bridge of history, but his considerations have indeed been borne out, also as regards the role of Asia in terms of global domination. In fact in his posthumous work Mankind and Mother Earth Toynbee already saw that Western Europe had lost its leading role to the United States. Having said this he believed that American supremacy would not last longer than that of the Mongol Empire a mere two generations! Looking ahead, he felt that it was quite likely that leadership in the future would pass from America to East Asia [5,6]. Today we are facing a new chapter in history, one in which the United States must try to map out the role it intends to play. Whether this will be oriented towards a dangerous hegemony or possibly will experiment a role that is more oriented towards promoting cooperation. As the great Bard wrote -‘To be or not to be: that is the question’. For the very first time after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States is faced with a new situation. It no longer has a well-defined enemy as the USSR had been; it is no longer the world’s only power as has been the case for the past twenty years; it can no longer play a dominant role, because its very own history means that its cultural model is now open to debate. It seems unsure of which role to play: one of continuity with the past twenty years or one more oriented towards the legitimation of a position focused on reducing global tensions [6-12].

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