America Alone (27 page)

Failed states destabilize their neighbors, and Americans don't have to pore over maps of West Africa to figure that out. Insofar as four of the September 11 killers obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flights that morning through the support network for "undocumented" workers, it's not unreasonable to argue that, if you're looking for really deep "root causes" for what happened that day, you could easily start with America's failure to nation-build in Mexico. And the problem with "exit strategy" fetishization is that these days, everywhere's Mexico--literally, in the sense that the September 11 killers were part of the Undocumented American community, and more figuratively in the sense that if you've got a few hundred bucks and an ATM card you can come to America and blow it up. Everyone lives next door now.

The United States, almost in inverse proportion to its economic and military might, is culturally isolated. I know, I know--you've read a thousand articles about America's "cultural imperialism." And that's fine if you mean you can fly around the world and eat at McDonald's, dress at the Gap, listen to Hilary Duff, and go see Charlie's Angels 3 or Dude, Where's My Car? 7 pretty much anywhere on the planet. But so what? The Merry Widow was both a blockbuster sensation on Broadway and Hitler's favorite operetta. If I sent my profile in to the average computer dating agency, they'd fix me up with Saddam Hussein: he and I have the same favorite singer (Frank Sinatra) and favorite candy (Britain's Quality Street toffees). It's not enough. You can easily like American pop culture without liking America: in London, the broadsheet newspapers that devote most space to U.S. cultural trends--the Guardian, the Independent--are the most vehemently anti-American. Then again, if you despise America's trash pop culture, it'll make you despise America even more. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevenement, former French foreign minister, and his celebrated assertion that the United States is dedicated to "the organized cretinization of our people"--a claim that's a lot more persuasive if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of French TV. In 2002, there was a shoot-out in a French town hall by some left-wing eco-loon, and one of the country's presidential candidates, Alain Madelin, deplored it as an "American-style by-product." One Frenchman kills eight other Frenchman and somehow it's proof of America's malign cultural influence.

You can sort of see what he's getting at. With very few exceptions, wherever you live in the world the landscape of the imagination is America: in the movie in your mind, the car chase takes place on the Los Angeles freeway, the love scene in Central Park, the massive explosion at the World Trade Center. The world watches Hollywood's America in a kind of post-neutron-bombed way: you get the sex and drugs and rock n' roll, the shoot-outs and
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fireballs, but the spirit of the country remains as foreign as ever. This is not a healthy phenomenon. On the things that matter--which, no disrespect, Hilary Duff doesn't--the gap between America and the rest of the world is wider than ever. If you define "cultural dominance" as cheeseburgers, America rules. But in the bigger cultural sense, it's a taste most of the world declines to pick up.

"Europe and America," said George W. Bush in Ireland in 2004, "are linked by the ties of family, friendship, and common struggle and common values." If so, the president and many other Americans have an all too common struggle articulating what those common values are. In Prague in 2002, Mr. Bush told fellow NATO members, 'We share common values--the common values of freedom, human rights, and democracy." Big deal. In a post-Communist world, these are vague, unobjectionable generalities to everyone except the head hackers in the Sunni Triangle. The "common values" stuff is the transnational equivalent of "Have a nice day." It's when you try to flesh it out that it all gets more complicated. The United States spends 3.4 percent of GDP on defense, the other NATO members spend on average 1.9 percent. So, if they do share "common values," Europe's prepared to spend a lot less defending them. On a raft of other issues, from guns to religion, America is also the exception. In North American terms, it's Canadian ideas, from socialized health care to confiscatory taxation, that are now the norm in the other Western democracies and, alas, in many of the emerging democracies. The raucousness of American pop culture--jazz, showgirls, hard-boiled cops--belies the hyperpower's geopolitical circumspection. And, on the receiving end, the Americanization of global pop culture puts a greater premium on being un-American in every other respect. Almost all the supranational bodies--from the EU to the International Criminal Court--are, if not explicitly hostile to American values, at the very least antipathetic to them. In the face of this rejection of the broader American culture, the popularity of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie isn't much consolation. Britain exported its language, law, and institutions around the world to the point where today there are dozens of countries whose political and legal cultures derive principally from London. On islands from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, you can find miniature Westminsters proudly displaying their maces and Hansards. But if England is the mother of parliaments, America's a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating. Of all the new nations that have come to independence since 1945 not one has adopted the American system of republican decentralized federalism--even though it's arguably the most successful ever invented.

The United States has zero interest in empire, for obvious reasons. For one thing, it's already as big as an empire, and most countries that controlled that big a land mass would probably run it in imperial fashion. Instead, America took a federation designed for a baker's dozen of ethnically homogeneous East Coast colonies and successively applied it across the continent and halfway over the Pacific. It's not strictly true that the sun never sets on the American Republic, but it's up an awful lot of the time. Beyond that, Americans are deeply suspicious of the notion that you can swan around the world "giving" freedom to people. They have to want it, like the first Americans did--as we say in New Hampshire, live free or die. If the Iraqis want a free society badly enough, they'll stick with it; if they don't and they take the easy option of falling for some puffed-up strongman, that's their problem, not America's.

While this might be philosophically admirable, the practical drawback is that power abhors a vacuum. If America won't export its values--self-reliance, decentralization--others
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will export theirs. In the eighties, Paul Kennedy warned the United States of "imperial overstretch." But the danger right now is of imperial understretch--of a hyperpower reluctant to sell its indisputably successful inheritance to the rest of the world. After Mao's victory, America's anti-Communists famously demanded to know, "Who lost China?"

Answer: Nobody. China wasn't lost. Chiang Kai-shek had never won it in the first place. He was merely an early beneficiary of American foreign policy's faith in unreal realpolitik-the system embodied in the cynicalline that so-and-so may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch. In the case of Mubarak, the House of Saud, and many others, the obverse is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch but in the end he's a sonofabitch. Even if it wasn't licensing anti-Americanism as a safety valve for what might otherwise be more locally directed grievances, the Cairo government would not be a meaningful friend. There's a huge difference between having a regime as an ally and having a nation as one, the difference being Egypt's Mohammed Atta and fifteen Saudi citizens flying through the windows of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--which suggests considerable limitations to the theory that, as long as America gets along fine with President Mubarak and key Saudi princes, it doesn't matter if everyone else in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" That, too, is a lesson in demography.

So instead of waiting ten years and demanding to know "Who lost Japan? Who lost Russia? And Europe? Oh, and who lost Britain?" analysts might be better advised to ponder why a supposed moment of unprecedented unipolar dominance doesn't feel like it. Most Americans are familiar with their stereotype abroad: the ugly American, loud, brash, ignorant, arrogant. It is, in most respects, the inversion of reality: America may be the most modest and retiring hegemon in history. "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? Most of America's European "allies" checked the Neither of the Above box and most Middle Eastern "allies" checked the Both of the Above box. Belgium isn't exactly with the terrorists but it isn't with us in any meaningful sense. Saudi Arabia is with us but also funding the terrorists in every corner of the world. And both countries get away with it. America has huge advantages. On the Continent, the Euroconsensus is shrinking both its economy and its population; America is managing to grow both. Why then project American power through transnational institutions disproportionately in thrall to European ideas? Especially when the one consistent feature of twenty-first century politics is the comprehensive failure of the over-Europeanized international order: UN staff facilitates Saddam's subversion of the Oil-for-Food program; the EU subsidizes the Palestinian intifada; the International Atomic Energy Agency provides cover for Iran's nuclear ambitions; the UN summit on racism is a grotesque orgy of racism. As we've learned since September 11, if there is a "white man's burden" in the early twenty-first century, it's not the burden of doing one's bit for the natives, but doing so under a hail of continual sniping from Chirac, Schröder, the Belgian guy, Kofi, Oxfam, the BBC, and a gazillion others: There's something a little bizarre about a so-called unipolar world, in which it's the unipole that gets shafted every time.

And, as the various local demographic adjustments start to take effect, America is in danger of finding itself in the same lonely camp as Israel. Nudge things half a decade down the road. There'll be an informal Islamo-veto over many areas of French and European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an
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American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America's not.

Al Qaeda thinks it's got America pegged--an effete, fleshy sultan sprawled languorously on overstuffed cushions, lost in sensual distractions. The choice for the United States is between those who believe America can take the lead in shaping the times and those who think the most powerful nation in human history can simply climb in the Suburban and go to the mall for its entire period of dominance. That's what the great Democratic Party allpurpose "multilateral" cure-all for United States foreign policy boils down to: "We need to hand power back to the UN. Or the EU. Or the Arab League. Or the Deputy Fisheries Minister of the Turks and Caicos Islands." Or as Thomas Friedman, the hilariously tortured foreign-policy grandee of the New York Times, agonized:

"Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the UN

Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the UN, and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes," etc, etc. Why would it be in America's interest to inflate the prestige of Boy Assad and Mubarak?

This lame-o multilateral outsourcing is the geopolitical equivalent of subcontracting your lawn care to "undocumented" immigrants: here you are, we don't mind giving you the money, just take care of it, we don't want to know the details, we want to go back to watching American Idol. Is foreign policy just another one of those "jobs Americans won't do"?

"Common values" and "universal values" are not all that common and universal, and the willingness to defend those values is even rarer. They've been sustained over the long haul by a very small group of countries. In the years ahead, America has to take the American moment seriously--in part, to ensure that the allies of tomorrow don't make the mistakes Western Europe did. That means at the very minimum something beyond cheeseburger imperialism. In the end, the world can do without American rap and American cheeseburgers. American ideas on individual liberty, federalism, capitalism, and freedom of speech would be far more helpful.

In 2004, Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore and a man who talks a lot more sense than most Continental prime ministers, visited Washington at the height of the Democrats' headless-chicken quagmire frenzy. He put it in a nutshell: "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the UN. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail."

The prime minister of Singapore apparently understands that more clearly than many Americans.

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Chapter Nine

The Importance of Being Exceptional

C I T I Z E N S V S . D E P E N D E N T S

Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets. The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreignerdespisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land "free and strong." BRIAN READE,
DAILY MIRROR
(LONDON), NOVEMBER 5, 2004

In the film
Superman Returns
, Superman returns-to fight not for "truth, justice, and the American way" but instead for "truth, justice, and all that stuff." In the not so subtle elision from "the American way" to "all that stuff" much peril lies. "The American way" is human and thus imperfect, but the European way leaves you well and truly stuffed, like a dead parrot after a trip to the taxidermist. In the end, hard wars are won on the hardest ground--at home. Whatever changes America makes in its foreign policy and transnational relationships, the home front is critical. You can't win a war of civilizational confidence with a population of nanny-state junkies. Take Brian Reade's list of American deformities--gun-totin', sistermarryin', foreigner-despisin', etc. It goes without saying that that's why I supported Bush in 2004, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 62,039,073 urinating rednecks. Mr. Reade, though, does usefully enumerate the distinctions that separate the American republic from the rest of the West, differences that will become even more important in the years ahead.