After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

I described to him how they all made similar efforts to swallow institutions and lubricate their efforts with corruption. How they try to make politics so futile or toxic that people just succumb to apathy, like John’s taxi driver. How Putin makes examples of people—killing or poisoning the occasional opposition figure as a message to others. How the Chinese Communist Party exhibited all of these characteristics but also used their economic and technological leverage to try to control not just Hong Kong but the behavior of countries like the United States and individuals as well. How all these leaders wrapped everything up in a nationalist bow to justify their control while their authoritarian repression became steadily more brazen. Given that reality, John asked, what could be done to restore what he called “normalcy”—where these leaders showed restraint; where, implicitly, China didn’t feel compelled to swallow up Hong Kong even if it didn’t like Hong Kong’s freedoms. All I could do was speak for what America could do, and I walked him, and maybe myself, through some of the realizations I’d come to in writing this book. How over the last thirty years, American-led globalization, our post-9/11 fixation on national security, and our scaling up of technologies that we didn’t fully understand had helped create the authoritarian dynamic that I’d just described. How America had been weakened by the Iraq War and the financial crisis and then gone through our own crisis of ident...