In the circumstances, the American Cheshire cat could have left behind at least the smile of its soft power, but even that is not the case. Take films. Once, classics such as The Godfather, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Taxi Driver and Rain Man dramatised different facets of American life for global consumption, primarily in the English language. Films on that scale simply do not exist any longer. Hence, as American soft power, too, fades away, the Cheshire Cat must be wondering: “Poor Alice! Where will she live now?” In a culturally lesser world, of course.
The Cheshire Cat’s vanishing smile in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a trick whereby the cat fades away in stages, leaving only its grin floating in the air before that, too, disappears. That act makes Alice exclaim: “I’ve seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat!”
The same might be said of America today. It is in danger of abdicating its role as the world’s default power as revisionist and irredentist powers claim that title little by little. Washington has decided that it will be the only hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, a desire that has begun to be translated into reality with the invasion of Venezuela. But the world at large is different: China, for example, is not Venezuela. There are many feline species looking for a catfight in the alleys of that wider world.
