Chalmers Johnson:
Sebastian Mallaby's screed is the mirror image of what Moscow's old Marx-Lenin Institute used to do - try to convince people that, in Mallaby's words, "the tide of history is flowing in the West's [conversely, the Soviet's] favor." Like his magazine, The Economist of London, Mallaby is an ideologist for the economic system that exists at least formally in the United States, Britain, and some other English-speaking countries (places that he and his fellow defenders of the faith like to call "the West" in their metaphysical writings). Just as the biggest problem for Mallaby's predecessors at Pravda was to find evidence of proletarian immiseration in the democracies, the biggest problem for the American triumphalists is to explain East Asia in ideologically acceptable terms.
These ideologists did not even notice the enrichment of East Asia until after it had become self-sustaining, could not explain it using their Nobel Prize-certified textbooks, and now predict that it will either collapse or start to copy the United States since no other outcome is "theoretically" possible. They want people to believe that "America enjoys world dominance in diplomacy, warfare, industry, science, media, and the sheer sense of how to live", as implausible as this is on the surface, and they insist that it is only a matter of time until the American way of life is "universally adopted."
