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Hugo Young
At its founding the United States never wanted to run the world. George Washington decreed that commerce not politics was what mattered, and Thomas Jefferson warned against the danger of “entangling alliances”. The treachery and slaughter endemic to the great powers, France and Britain, in their seven years’ war for European and colonial supremacy, were anathema to the builders of the shining city on a hill. The economic domination the founders envisaged need never, they thought, bring imperial responsibility.
Much later, a word was coined for this: isolationism. It has come and gone in the American soul ever since. Theodore Roosevelt challenged it, desiring to control the Western hemisphere and deriding an electorate that “screamed with anguish over the loss of a couple of thousand men”. Two world wars changed the national stance utterly. But the psyche of the heartlands, and their hunger to be left alone, remained. It was intensified by the Vietnam experience. In many Americans a certain innocence, the very opposite of power-neurosis, has survived all these events. They are not warlike people. The US was secure behind the stockade and that was all that mattered. This is the instinct that George W Bush, unlike any president since 1930, has tried to make the linchpin of his foreign policy, by defiant unilateralism and rejection of any international treaty that might burden his voters.
What happened on Tuesday changed the course of human history. We cannot yet grasp all that this means. But already we start to imagine how it will poison trust, wreck relationships, challenge the world order and magnify the divide between the enemies and friends of what we call democracy. It will harden the last vestiges of tolerance for compromise and further reverse the presumptions of freedom of travel, speech, politics, everything. It calls into question what power any longer is or means. But most of all it has punctured the dream of American isolation.
This presents a challenge to the US, but also to its allies. It calls for an internationalism that neither side fully understands: a solidarity that requires the US and Europe to be clearer than they’ve been about their roles.
For the US, disengagement of any kind is now more plainly not an option. To pretend that the Middle East could benefit from Washington’s withdrawal of mediation might have been honourably meant, but it was disastrous. It helped only to stoke the Arab-Israeli conflict. Flaunting one’s national entitlement to abandon the global struggle for environmental, biological or missile treaties was a way of showing two fingers to the world: fulfilling the worst suspicions that, under a new president, the Great Satan was becoming a parody of itself.
Europe, however, is not guiltless. Europe, especially the Europe of the left, has been deeply confused about what it wants the US to be and do. For three decades the left was the chief critic of American power and influence. France led the charge against the hegemon, and she wasn’t alone. Yet, faced with a president who showed signs of withdrawal from global influence and responsibility, what have the social democratic governments of Europe done? Taken fright at American retrenchment and pleaded with the US to stay in the Balkans. The critique that used to tell the US to go away now worries about the US withdrawing into itself.
No more, I think, will that siren song be heard. There must be less rivalry and no confusion. The cataclysmic abominations inflicted on New York and Washington are bound to mark the end of Bush’s excursion towards unilateral disengagement, but also the end of Europe’s double-talk about the excesses of American power. The truths that emerge from the infamous day point without ambiguity in the same collaborative direction.
The first truth is that there are severe limits to American power. Built to defend itself against a structured threat from visible enemies, she turns out to be powerless against other kinds of attack. The greatest military power there has ever been cannot defend itself against terrorists who have no respect for human lives. All the wire-tapping in the world could not save it. Its might proved worthless against a gang of fanatics with a cause that breaks the bounds of normal human discourse. This is not a reason to deride the US, still less rejoice in its impotence. It simply discloses a new and hideous fact about the world order, which it’s hard to see being changed by any upgrading of the missiles. Only better intelligence has a chance of equalising the struggle between good and evil.
But secondly, this needs to be a collaborative enterprise in all the directions it takes. There’s a contradiction between saying that the assault was not just on the US but on the entire civilised world, while also insisting that the US must be supported in making whatever response she chooses. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder quickly echoed US Secretary of State Colin Powell in declaring that. They’re right to depict the suicide bombers as striking at the free world: this was an attack on the political system of democracy, not just on one enemy state. But if that is so, then the free world at large is entitled to some sort of voice on how its values are now best to be defended.
The temptation is to wait and watch while the US gears up for a response. Who could blame the American people for demanding some kind of recompense? Who could deny the greatest power on earth the right to determine alone what it will do to demonstrate that it cannot be defeated?
Yet one must hope its leadership does not see things so simply, and that its allies can do better than offer fatalistic support for unilateral and undebated retaliation. There must be solidarity, yes. No equivocation about “understanding” the grievances that are supposed to justify what is unconscionable. But retaliation against precisely whom? And defence against what? By what future means? With what appreciation of the hold the weak now have over the strong? These are questions to which the democratic world as a whole needs most urgently to direct itself, if freedom is not to perish from the earth.