Khanna, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and director of the Global Governance Initiative, recently published The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

Q: Maybe we should start with the laying of blame. In 1949 the question was “who lost China?” One question that might be provoked by your book is: Who lost the world? Was it the “imperial overstretch” of the Bush administration? Was it the decade of drift under Bill Clinton? Or was it inevitable that America would lose its position of dominance, no matter what anyone did?

A: It was inevitable. Globalization did it, not Bush. What globalization does is resist centralization. You can no longer have central authority over anything, and that applies to America’s hegemonic position in the world as well. Power, technology, money, modernity spread everywhere—just about everywhere—which means countries have the resources now to do whatever they want. America is kind of waking up to that new world where it isn’t the only power. Globalization sets the rules, not America. 

Q: Is that a message you can sell in the current American political climate? Can you sell, “We’re number three?"

A: I don’t think this is something that presidential candidates need to talk about in terms of where do we stack up, where are we winning, where are we losing. But what does have to be sold is a set of ideas and policies for how to manage American foreign policy and economic strategy in this landscape. 

Q: Is your message perhaps as much directed at the Democrats as it is the Republicans? The rhetoric of the Democrats is still, “We will regain American leadership—we’ll do so through soft power rather than hard power, we’ll play nicely with others, but it will still be American leadership.”

A: Absolutely. The Democrats are actually just Republican Lite. They still believe that the world is there for the taking, it’s just a question of how you do it. Nonsense! It is not the case. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not care who the next president of the United States is; the European Union hardly even cares who the next president is. Russia doesn’t even care. Russia only cares about the price of oil. Whether Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain is the next president is a distant eighth priority for them. 

Q: A skeptic might say you overstate the degree to which the European Union can be viewed as a superpower: they don’t have their own army, they can’t seem to cobble together a coherent foreign policy, and the more countries they take in the more incoherent they become. How do you answer that?

A: It’s a mistake to measure Europe against the coherence that is demanded of a singular unitary nation state. Europe is a different form of entity altogether—it’s a supranational, transnational, postmodern network empire. It’s actually a more appropriate structure for the 21st century than America’s structure is, in a way.

They don’t have one army, they have many armies. They don’t have one foreign policy, they have many foreign policies. But can you demonstrate to me that there are areas where what one country does hurts the others rather than eventually helping them? When Italy builds a gas pipeline from Libya, does that hurt Denmark? No. I mean, the energy is going into the common gas market which is being developed. When Germany takes the lead on Russia and Spain takes the lead on Venezuela, is that a bad thing? No, not at all. When the French and the Spanish invest in migration centres in North Africa to create jobs there to diminish illegal immigration into Europe, is that bad for Germany and for Britain? No, it's good for them. I’m glad they don’t have a constitution. Why over-centralize?