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Change of the U.S. Role in the World
In today’s LA Times Fred Kaplan discusses the need of a more realistic U.S. view on its changed role in the world:
It should be no surprise that the presidential campaigns have barely touched on foreign policy. […] [N]o ambitious politician is willing to mention the discomfiting reality about America’s place in the world — that we are weaker today than we were a decade or two ago, and that we need a new foreign policy that acknowledges and builds on that fact.
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Our leverage over half the world during the previous half-century had stemmed not just from American muscle but from the existence of a common enemy. […] But when the [Soviet] bear died, the alliance’s threads loosened.
[…]
The United States has emerged from the tectonic shift as something more like an ordinary country — a world power but not a superpower. This is unfamiliar territory for Americans. For half a century, we had been a superpower in a world that was tightly structured. Now we’re upper-middle management in a world without big bosses — a world that’s either becoming multipolar or teetering toward anarchy.
[…]
It’s no longer morning in America, but it’s not quite twilight either. The next president’s big challenge will be to revive America’s influence and stature while facing up to the limits of its power in a newly fractured world. And one of the bigger political challenges of that task will be to acknowledge, openly, that our power does have limits.
The U.S. elections are watched closely all over the world because they matter. There sometimes seems to be as much reporting on U.S. candidates in my local German rag as there is in U.S. papers.
In the German weekly Die Zeit former chancellor and ‘atlanticist’ Helmut Schmidt has Twelve Questions for the Candidates (in German; the automated translation gets the gist). His questions touch on the same issue Kaplan is writing about.
If the U.S. wants to stay important, it will have to seek consense and stop to dictate solutions.
Unfortunatly none of the candidates has really spoken out about foreign policy. Yes, there are a few mangled bits about Iraq, but the world is much bigger than that and there are other very important issues.
The campaigns all are working by the mantra ‘elections are local’. U.S. voters still seem to believe that U.S. foreign policy doesn’t really matter much to them.
But, as Kaplan rightly points out, the U.S. position in the world has changed. The consequences of U.S. foreign policy will have bigger and bigger domestic repercussions. This especially in an economic sense and far beyond the price of oil.
There needs to be more public discussion about cause and effect of U.S. foreign policy. 9/11 was a chance for that. But then the discussion was quickly supressed in favor of a certain imperial agenda.
It is exactly this semi-religious belief in Exceptionalism which time and time again brings suffering to mankind. From ancient cultures such as Rome, through the British empire, to Nazi-Germany, the last thing this world needs is delusional mortals with a conviction that they are somewhat superior. Largely unnoticed by those narcists, busy wallowing in self-admiration, the world laughs at people who claim to be part of the Ueber-race/nation. Coz besides bigger and more guns, tools of mindless war, they have nothing which sets them apart from the rest. Certainly not brains.
To watch one administration after another roam the international circuit like Ming the Merciless, makes the average universal punter wish for Flash Gordon to rocket by to show Ming where the hammer hangs. This has lead to a rise in popularity of regimes who stand up against the machine known as US foreign policy. Large numbers of world citizens cheer at news that the US has problems of sort, creating an environment in which the country’s superpower status can not survive.
If the USA wants to regain popularity points it lost over the decades, it must address foremost and first of all the hypocrisy it has become to personify. She is certainly not the only nation which says one thing and does another, but to do so in such blatant a fashion as the US does, factually asks for worldwide condemnation. There is hardly one facet of US foreign policy which isn’t a contradiction to another. Proclaiming that democratic elections in Palestine are a great step forward, and then refusing to deal with the party that got fair & square elected, makes for one bad joke.
The rules at the table are mostly straight forward. If you want to spread democracy, don’t support dictators. If you don’t want other countries to have nuclear weapons, have none yourself. If you want to lift Africa out of poverty, give more aid. Should peace on earth be your desire, start no wars. If the appearance of being god’s nation is important to you, act as Jesus would have. Don’t want foreign countries meddle with your affairs, don’t meddle in other countries. Can’t get much easier than that. Don’t do upon others what you don’t want to have done to yourself.
To have the courts stacked by daddy, allowing thus sonny to win a rigged election, is just not democracy. Thinking about it, to have first the father, and a few years later the son run a country doesn’t sound like democracy. Or first the husband then his wife, out of a quarter of a billion people, is democracy the right word? Dynasty more likely, with many of the past 40 odd presidents having somehow or another been of the same house. The incestuous relationships within the parliamentary scene, lead to a congress where one crow won’t pick on the other. Preaching democracy to other nations becomes then that much harder, if oneself has a system which allows its president to unashamedly commit war crimes without ever being held accountable for it by congress.
To be seen as a nation one should aspire to, it also pays to have affordable health care for everyone, a social net able to catch the falling before they hit the ground. The missing funds to do that are actually not missing at all, just misspend on items needed to project fabricated power. A rethink in that direction might help the US’s role on the global stage, allowing for more people across the world to feel more comfortable when the US under-secretary of state visits the neighboring country, whilst at the same time reversing the trend of slipping down the global rankings whenever social & domestic indicators are measured. What a chance to be the beacon.
And although I believe that large sections in the “elite” are beyond hope, I have faith in the US electorate. The watermark of American Exceptionalism on the pages chosen to record US history, and this is not the last act, many chapters still to come, will be barely visible once the full story has been written. Humble pie, paid in gold and blood. There is only so many imperial wars one can wage before the karmic wheel catches up. Nevermind the stock market. Once the sad truth of “guilty through indifference” hits home, the realization that what is going down is largely happening because of one’s own complacency, that’s when I guess the proverbial pitchforks will come out. It will not be soon, but come it will. As predictable as a flush in the toilet.
The end of the old SU empire, if one can call it that, was partly due to its imperial overstretch, hence overspending on military expenses and underspending on the domestic front. In order to keep the inevitable critics under control, increasing efforts were needed to create more and more elaborate means of spying on the own population. Not that different from what the US is doing today. Eventually the public will wake up in droves to this impending repetition of history to put someone in power who’ll pull the lever on the imperialometer into reverse.
Except that nowhere in the original concept of exceptionalism is the patented need or desire to export it.
So true. Looking at the long list of ideologists who have asserted their tribe/nation’s right to exceptionalism, to be the one out, with true claim to be exceptional, would be the one nation who didn’t end up lecturing the “inferior” nations about how to go about their business. The invention of a new technology is certainly not exceptional, but for the first time in history to not consider its use for military purpose would be.
It’s hard to see how a nation could be exceptional on all fronts, but to be truly outstanding on the ones that matter, human rights and environmental concerns being just two, a good dose of self-criticism is needed. Leading by example rather than the sword should be the motto, a point so totally lost on many on Capitol Hill. Not dictating changes to others, invite imitations instead.
Posted by: Juan Moment | Feb 4 2008 9:22 utc | 27
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