Mal d’America

Mal d’America is the third issue of Limes of 2024: on newsstands, bookstores and ebooks from March 6th.
The volume focuses on the structural crisis of American power, an increasingly evident feature of our historical moment and a central part of the geopolitical earthquake that is shaking the world order, with outcomes that are still largely uncertain but clearly destabilizing. This is a crisis that comes from afar, as already documented by Limes in recent years, but which now seems to manifest itself clearly due to the turbulent international situation and the worsening of socioeconomic problems within the United States, with the related political repercussions -institutional.

Here lies the salient feature of the American phenomenon: beyond and before a crisis of external projection, the American one is a crisis of optimism and self-confidence.

The external reverberations of the American disorientation involve, to varying degrees, all the subjects with which America interfaces. Friends and allies, obviously including us Europeans, who contemplate with concern the hypothesis of a disengagement by Washington capable of attenuating the security guarantee. But also adversaries and enemies, from Russia to China via Iran and North Korea, tempted to seize the opportunity to advance their respective strategic agendas. In between, many countries, especially from the so-called “Global South”, such as Turkey, India, Arab countries and South-East Asian states, whose conduct appears to be guided in this phase by a mixture of fear and opportunism.

In the first part, The crisis of the empire, the manifestations of the American crisis are analyzed from the point of view of external projection. The second part, The crisis of the republic, focuses on the “storm” within the country. While the third part, The failure of the universities, examines a specific but fundamental feature of the crisis: the degeneration in a qualitative and consociational sense of the academy, counted by various observers – from the United States and elsewhere – among the most evident and harmful manifestations of the “disease of ‘America”.

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