In Defense of America (17 page)

But if you add to the issues on Americans’ minds the problem of securing energy resources and of trying to wean parts of its economy off the use of large cars, it is clear that politicians have a hugely demanding task adjudicating between all these groups at home. For other countries, it will become harder to persuade Americans that they should continue to look outward to other problems, and should risk tens of billions of dollars and their soldiers’ lives in doing so. As Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, argues, “The US is not going to be eclipsed any time soon by another superpower, but it may exhaust itself by allowing its commitments to exceed the resources that the public is willing to allot to foreign policy.”
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The Superpower Is Not Facing Eclipse

Lind is surely right that it is much too pessimistic to predict the eclipse of the American superpower. On the contrary, Russia is in no position to challenge it, and China has enormous problems to overcome before it can realistically do so. But China’s evolution, if it took a malign form, could still cause America and other liberal democracies great discomfort. So could Russia, if causing that discomfort came to seem, to its leaders, like the only attractive mission left to them.

The best way for the United States to manage those challenges is to persuade both countries to work within the system of rules and institutions it has helped build. For that, it needs other countries’ help, particularly in Europe, but those countries in turn should not take America’s effort for granted.

Chapter 10

HOW AMERICA COULD HELP ITSELF

My mother, an American, was always amused after coming to live in Britain by the euphemism of “helping police with inquiries” for those who had just been arrested. “What helpful suggestions could you make?” she would say. “ ‘Have you thought of looking in the river?’ ”

It seems just as presumptuous to advise a superpower on how to repair its world image and restore its influence abroad when it doesn’t recognize the conversation. Bush administration officials, and many U.S. citizens, have often made it clear that they don’t give a damn what others think. “Oh, the envy,” said one comment from San Francisco on
The Times
Web site, about a piece criticizing the United States’ refusal to sign a United Nations accord against an “arms race in space,” where 160 countries voted in favor. “Most of the 160 get to work on a donkey,”
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added the writer —and he was not the only one to express such sentiments.

All the same, I have offered here suggestions for change which would improve the predicament in which America finds itself after Iraq and President George W. Bush, as it faces a breathtaking range of challenges, with economic turmoil and worries about climate change adding to the list of ugly problems left around Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East. There are practical steps it could take to improve relations with countries that should be its allies and people who should be its natural supporters.

It should immediately drop policies, such as the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, that it cannot justify by its own values. It should go a long way in softening its tone on those, such as climate change, where it has some justification for going its own way, but which are found so provocative by the rest of the world that they carry huge political cost. It should wean itself off those which represent a view of the world that it finds tempting —the “War on Terror,” the threat of China —but which represent a paranoid exaggeration of the threat it faces and blind it to a better-judged response.

The changes would help retrieve the United States’ authority in advocating its democratic values and its belief in a world governed by the rule of law and international treaties, which many people and governments are now challenging or rejecting altogether. The list may also be a balm for the self-laceration with which some Americans have tormented themselves during Iraq and the Bush years. There is a line beyond which the United States should not go in accommodating a planet full of critics. There are some actions for which it should apologize, but there is a limit —which comes early, I have argued —beyond which it should concede nothing. It should not apologize for its central values or for its essential difference from those who dislike its choices.

Elect a New President

The Economist
commented toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency that “if America were a stock, it would be a ‘buy’: an undervalued market leader, in need of new management.” It added: “But that points to its last great strength. More than any rival, America corrects itself.”
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America’s unsurpassed tool for “correcting itself” is the election of a new president and Congress. The headiness felt in Britain, Germany, France —and of course in the United States itself —at the 2008 election campaign showed the exhilaration so many felt about the prospect of a new president, one who might allow Americans to feel good about their country again, and their allies not ashamed of their allegiance.

Give a Nod to Cooperation

The Bush administration, in its closing months, tried to make some correction itself, and became a partial convert to the notion of civility. It called together the Annapolis summit on the Middle East in November 2007, and tried hard not to wreck the international talks on climate change in Bali shortly afterward. It began working energetically within the United Nations system it had derided ahead of the Iraq invasion to secure tighter sanctions on Iran and a joint approach on Darfur. In November 2007, President Bush welcomed Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s new president, as a good new friend. But fully repairing the Bush administration’s relations with the world was a lost cause by mid-2007.

A mere change of tone from the abrasion of the Bush administration will not solve America’s problems abroad, but it would be a start. It is not going to dissolve entrenched opposition within a United Nations whose instincts are often profoundly anti-American, nor is it going to erase the differences that run deep between America and Europe over the Middle East and the “War on Terror.” But it would be a first defense against the charge that America is indifferent to the principle of a world governed by laws, unless they suit its own interests.

Act on Global Warming, the Economy, and Trade

A more substantial defense would be to pursue a serious deal with other countries on curbing climate change, one of the fastest ways for a new administration to say that it has brought change from the Bush years. Global warming is a problem too serious for America not to respond. Indeed, the prospect of severe upheaval to people’s lives within the next fifty years outstrips the terrorist threat on which the Bush administration has put such weight, even if it is impossible to put good numbers on either probability. And climate change has taken on too much political resonance, in Europe and in the developing world, for America not to suffer badly from seeming like the world’s villain.

The United States can justifiably argue that in the 1970s and 1980s, it helped bring environmental issues to the world’s attention and —up to a point —that in its resistance to binding targets it is protecting the well-being its economic growth brings to itself and others. But it needs to show more willingness. American leaders have claimed that the United States can battle global warming by developing new technology; it needs to show that this is happening, and that such technology is being sold to the dirtier parts of the developing world. Luckily, the rise in the price of oil has done a lot of the work in kick-starting the search for energy efficiency.

An economic slump will make climate change targets easier to meet, although it may take some political momentum out of the movement as well, as attention switches to the turmoil in the financial markets and the threat of a crash in house prices. That economic challenge may be, for Bush’s successors, as big as 9/11 was for him; it lacks the hideous drama, but it affects far more people, in America and abroad. Here other countries will look to America for leadership. That may not mean dramatic action —in such a crisis, there are always calls for ambitious new rules or institutions to prevent it happening again. But America could help by overhauling its antique and tangled regulation of banks, and by making careful decisions about when, if ever, to use taxpayers’ money to bail out banks and people who can’t pay their mortgages.

Unfortunately, trade talks are rarely made easier in tough times for the economy. Protectionism will rise, as countries fear that their own people’s jobs will be lost. It would be a huge pity if the United States indulged itself in one of its spasms of protectionism when it is better placed than any other country to give the lead in promoting liberal trade. In particular, it would help to let go of its grotesque subsidies of nearly $20 billion a year paid to its dwindling band of farmers, which have outstripped even the European Union’s notorious excesses in that realm.

Stop Demonizing China

Trade is America’s best chance to pull China further within the laws and institutions of the developed world. It would help to tone down the fearmongering about China, an area where Congress presents a more extreme face to the world than do America’s presidents (although European governments are now rivaling it). But the saber rattling and antagonism help America in nothing: not in enforcing trade rules, nor in racing to buy up energy supplies, nor in heading off the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea, and the Middle East.

That is not to say that China is benign. But America would get further by pointing out to China that engagement in these problems is in its own interest, and that its traditional distaste for involving itself in diplomacy is unsustainable.

Stay Engaged in Iraq and the Region

Economic threats may rival Iraq and the Middle East as the greatest challenge for President Bush’s successor, but America will still be judged across the world by its handling of the Iraq debacle after Bush. It can pull out troops, but it cannot cut and run from the problem overall, out of responsibility to Iraqis and out of its own self-interest.

Part of that solution will be continuing to work to unblock the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, to which the Bush administration gave only sporadic attention. The problem has worsened during that neglect, with the rise to power of the Hamas Islamist group and Israel’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank, toward which Bush was extraordinarily accepting, even given that support for Israel is an unwavering commitment of American policy, no matter who the president. “Engagement” is an overused word, but it means, at the least, recognition that the United States is the only party that can put pressure on Israel to make the concessions that will be a central part of any deal. It also means persistence, even when a deal seems impossible, as now. It is an honorable principle that few situations are so bleak they cannot be improved, even if they cannot be resolved.

But for all the inflammatory power the conflict retains, in the images now instantly broadcast across the Arab world on Arabic television, it has arguably been eclipsed as a problem by the other consequences of the Iraq invasion —and the rise of Iran as a regional giant is the worst.

Consider Talking to Iran

Iran’s determination to give itself the ability to make its own nuclear weapons —which it might manage during the American presidency after Bush’s —is one of America’s most difficult foreign problems. Bombing Iran’s suspected nuclear sites —and there might be hundreds —was never attractive. But the unfortunately phrased conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, published at the end of 2007, allowed Iran to claim the high ground. The report asserted that Iran had stopped actually trying to design a nuclear warhead but did not give enough emphasis to its other conclusion that more difficult work, also crucial to making a weapon, had continued.

No option is attractive, but one clearly open to Bush’s successor —which Bush emphatically ruled out —is to consider talking to Iran about mutual interests for security in the region. The policy of withholding mere contact with the United States as punishment, a core tactic of the Bush administration, has manifestly not worked.

Work with Europe on Handling Russia

Iran would not be such a problem if it did not have Russia’s support. It is overdramatic to pronounce the start of a new cold war, but Putin’s threat in June 2007 to point nuclear missiles at Europe again, and his decision in December 2007 to send Iran the fuel for its first nuclear reactor, show he intends to defy the West where it has most explicitly asked for his help. For Britain and America, Putin’s antagonism suddenly seemed to be coloring every issue: Kosovo, gas supplies to Europe, America’s desire to base a new missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, and Russia’s decision to suspend the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty.

In all of these instances, Europe’s interests are very close to those of America. But for the sake of getting on with Russia, and not provoking their huge neighbor, some countries have conceded it points that America rightly does not want to do. At the NATO summit in April 2008, Germany blocked the United States’ call to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, for fear of upsetting Russia. The United States took an honorable position in that argument —even if it knew it would lose —but to win those debates with Europe is going to take effort. America cannot take the alliance with Europe for granted, even if that means a degree of perpetual courtship which it feels should be unnecessary given the military protection it extends to the continent.

Don’t Neglect Eastern Europe

On that note, America is in serious danger of neglecting the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and of taking for granted their enthusiasm for all things American. Their expressions of gratitude to the United States when the Iron Curtain fell were genuine and overwhelming, but such loyalty is no longer automatic.

The Polish government elected in October 2007 promptly said that it would take its nine hundred troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008, and that the United States should not assume Poland would agree to host its missile shield. True, Poland’s expectations of the new “special relationship” with Washington were too high. Some Polish commentators giddily talked of Poland’s becoming a “second Israel” or a “United States supertanker on the waters of Eastern Europe.” But Poland is just the loudest voice among countries which suddenly think they should hedge their bets in backing the superpower.