Top dog for ever

Mitt Romney produces an unimaginative blueprint for America’s foreign policy

Oct 15th 2011|5 min read

BY ITS end, most people would agree, the 20th century was an American century. Mitt Romney says that he wants the 21st century to be American too. That seems a little greedy. Britain had a good claim to be top nation roughly from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the first world war, a hundred years that struck a lot of non-Britons as quite enough of a good thing, thank you very much. Still, accept for the sake of argument that the Republican front-runner is correct when he says that God did not create America to be just “one of several equally balanced global powers”. How does he propose, given the economic rise of China, India and Latin America, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the general bolshiness of assorted Russians, Arabs and Persians, to keep America on top for the whole of the 21st century?

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Top dog for ever”