A Dangerous Interregnum - NYTimes.com LONDON - In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The world is once again living an interregnum. It is poised between inward-looking old powers and reluctant emergent ones. The post-9/11 era is over; it has bequeathed an exhausted America. Morbid symptoms include a dysfunctional United Nations Security Council, a Syria that bleeds, an American economy squeezing its middle class and a Europe that leaves its youth jobless. But does anyone want the superpower's mantle? According to a survey this year by the Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Americans think the president should concentrate on domestic policy, against 6 percent who believe his priority should be foreign affairs. That is the lowest recorded number for foreign policy concerns since Pew's survey on national priorities began 15 years ago. In 2007, 39 percent thought the president's primary focus should be domestic, as compared with 40 percent for foreign. This is the national mood behind the withdrawal from Iraq, the looming pullback from Afghanistan, the last-minute retreat from military strikes against Syria, and a possibly imminent (and highly desirable) interim deal with Iran on its nuclear program. If there is a single phrase America has taken to heart it comes from Robert Gates, the former defense secretary: "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined," as General MacArthur so delicately put it." The immense toll in lives and treasure of Iraq and Afghanistan - wars the country will try to forget rather than memorialize - explains part of the inward turn. So, too, does a feeling that something is skewed in an economy where for many the relationship between hard work and reward seems lost. But there is something more, a very American pragmatism that has understood the power shift now underway and wants the nation to husband its resources after a reckless decade. When an exhausted Britain in imperial decline passed the mantle of global power to the United States, the transition was relatively seamless, an affair between cousins. Today America's travails inspire schadenfreude but nobody much wants the keys to the kingdom. Never have the ambitions of the European Union been so circumscribed. Consumed with internal problems, particularly those of the euro, it has lost coherence. Europe, for the foreseeable future, will spend more time debating its internal architecture than defining its external objectives. The French-German alliance, the motor of integration, is frayed to the point of near rupture. Germany needs France less and has shed many of its complexes, but history and self-absorption mean it will punch below its weight, doing enough to avert European implosion but not enough to give Europe renewed impulsion. America's inward turn finds Europe introverted, unable to take a leadership role on any crisis but its own. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is a spoiling power above all, still driven by the notion that, as he once put it, the Soviet Union's collapse was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Its ambitions lie in turning back the clock. China, the heir apparent to nobody's world, has scarcely a word to say on Syria, less still on Iran. Stability is its watchword, with an eye on full development by midcentury. It still needs America as an offsetting power in Asia. It is heavily invested in the avoidance of any American economic debacle. Peaceful rise means cautious rise. Neither China nor India shows much interest for now in new organizing principles for the world. Perhaps, those principles are now defined by technology, social networks and individual empowerment, forces that lie outside conventional notions of geostrategic power. But this is just another way of saying that the world's current interregnum is little understood. It is just over a decade since President George W. Bush lumped North Korea, Iraq and Iran together in an "axis of evil," an unhappy phrase pregnant with disastrous consequences. The United States has since learned many bitter lessons. The importance of the now likely deal with Iran, and of the conversations taking place between Tehran and Washington on a range of subjects, goes well beyond the nuclear dossier. The Iranian revolution was an uprising against Western dominance (just as the nuclear program is above all an assertion of technological independence). For more than three decades, antagonism has prevailed. If the United States and Iran can reach some accommodation, it would be the most powerful signal in a long time of an American willingness to rethink its global strategy in the most volatile area of the world. Interregnums are dangerous - and doubly morbid if unaccompanied by a readiness to think anew about changed power structures.