TOM FRIEDMAN: “Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power?”

That’s pretty much the question in John Birmingham’s forthcoming next novel, in which the United States literally disappears. (As I noted the other day, I read it in page proofs; it rocks). And the answer is “not as much as they might have thought.”