Superpower
by Ian Bremmer
(Penguin, £14.99)

BAD as President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been, the next US administration is likely to be worse.

If the current president has been something of a reluctant warmonger, the next one will surely shed the inhibitions.

Democrat front runner Hillary Clinton “struggles with her inner neocon” in the words of a recent magazine profile. Frankly, she could do with struggling a bit harder. 100 per cent pro-Israel, where Obama might struggle to do better than a solid 80, and an advocate of aggression against Syria, she was also a strong supporter of the Iraq war.

The Republicans will, of course, choose someone still worse in all likelihood.

The latest Bush along, after some waffling, has sort of admitted that Iraq was a mistake. But he and all the other GOP challengers favour a muscular interventionist US, with the singular exception of Rand Paul, who has very little chance of winning.

So it is time for the left to start planning for renewed US aggression — if not on the full Bush-Blair scale, at least more than we have recently been used too. Not just in the Middle East either — we need to watch Ukraine and eastern Europe, as well as the mounting tensions in the Far East too.

But, whatever the choices the next White House occupant makes, it is against a background of relative US decline. Bested in Iraq, challenged by China, disrespected in Latin America and with a disgraced economic model, Washington’s writ does not run as far as it would like it to.

Ian Bremmer, a currently fashionable pundit in the US east coast foreign policy establishment, grapples with these challenges in this book. He offers three models for how the US should approach the world. Naturally, he does not call any of them “imperialism.”

Instead they are “indispensable America” — neo-con cowboys saddle up here to run the whole ranch — “money-ball America” — target interventions where US interests are really at stake — and “independent America” — leave the world more-or-less be and focus on fixing the USA first.

This last is Bremmer’s personal preference. He argues that since the end of the cold war we have had “incoherent America” with politicians unable to settle on one strategy or another.

“It’s not simply that America can no longer police the world. It’s that it has no right to force those who disagree with us to see things our way,” he writes. Amen to that.

He adds: “For the past 25 years, America’s leaders have acted as if the US were becoming stronger in the world. That simply isn’t the case. The rest of the planet is catching up and US foreign policy should reflect that fact.”

And yet, it can be predicted with some confidence, we will continue to get “imperial America.” Paul aside, no mainstream presidential candidate — servants of Wall Street and corporate America one and all — is going to follow Bremmer’s lead. The sad and sobering truth is that Obama is about as liberal a US politician as that mainstream is capable of producing at the moment.

So what we really need is “challenged America,” where the aggressive elite, still hungering for world domination by one means or another, is met by determined opposition from without and within, building on the experiences of the movements against the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Bremmer calls his book Superpower. But, as the New York Times wrote in 2003, there are in fact two superpowers in the world. The other is the mobilised masses, fighting for peace and justice.