Leaning Away. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013. Also here.
Maybe the real failed states are the ones
that have the means to help other nations – but choose to retreat inward.
America’s supremacy is finished. Why don’t we understand this? By Sean Thomas. The Telegraph, June 24, 2013.
Rothkopf:
It is
true that within each country’s borders, different views exist of the
obligations of individual citizens to one another, of provinces and cities to
their neighbors, of the large and small private entities in the polity –
corporations, churches, and other institutions – to society as a whole. Some
countries elevate and value community. Some serve the state to the detriment of
individual people. And some, like the United States, celebrate individuality to
a fault. At least some Americans do, seeing the responsibilities manifest in the
actions, sinews, laws, and regulations of government as overreach, an
encroachment.
Americans
celebrate this independent spirit. Their market ideology is more Charles Darwin
than Adam Smith, suggesting somehow that if we value the survival of the
fittest, then the casualties of the weak are merely part of nature’s grand
equation. Even those who don’t embrace the most extreme aspects of this
frontier fuck-you-ism at home almost certainly do abroad. It is a great
American tradition. From George Washington’s farewell admonition to avoid
foreign entanglements to the isolationism that is by far America's greatest and
longest-lasting international policy impulse – the same inclination that had
only 17 percent of Americans in favor of getting involved in the war in Europe
even as it raged in the middle of 1940 – the view of this great nation has more
often than not been that the world’s problems are not its own.
Sure,
Americans went off and fought two world wars. The United States has intervened
throughout the past century in every corner of the globe and has put troops on
every habitable continent at one time or another. But not only has it done so
selectively – it has helped create international institutions that are only
capable of doing so selectively. In the wake of World War II, the United States
helped make an international system that had two main purposes: to create the
illusion of having one and to help advance U.S. interests. The system’s
institutions by design are weak, toothless, and possessed of only limited
resources.
This
approach has clearly failed. Today the greatest problems we face are almost
universally the global calamities that demand strong international mechanisms
and a global sense of community that do not exist and are anathema to the
selfish spirit that was the great contribution of the Peace of Westphalia:
global warming, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the cancer of
failed and failing states that destabilize their neighbors, spreading refugees
and unrest across borders.
Rothkopf is condemning the Jacksonian worldview, its division of the world into the folk community and the dark world outside. The sense of global community that a left liberal progressive internationalist like Rothkopf demands goes against everything Jacksonians believe to be true of the world and the realities of human nature. It is unlikely that this will change anytime soon.
