January 21, 2009
Author: Ben Slingo, Student at Cambridge, UK
D. H. LAWRENCE, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, declared America to be ‘the evening land’. It is not, I hazard, a description that Barack Obama would care for. As it was bestowed in 1923, it has little claim to geopolitical prescience, a failing to which Lawrence himself was doubtless indifferent. Yet despite its perversity when first conferred, the poetic title is becoming ever more appropriate. For all the optimism that suffused Mr. Obama’s campaign, and for all the belligerent confidence that too often marred that of his opponent, the country over which he will soon preside is not about to a witness a new dawn of vitality and hope: it is already in the grip of a long and inexorable decline. Thus far the descent, apparent in the bloodshed of Iraq and the still more gruesome carnage on Wall Street, has not been an edifying one. Mr. Obama’s calling is not to arrest it, but to conduct it with a little more dignity.
A decade ago, such a gloomy prescription would have seemed as dubious as it did when Lawrence composed his epithet. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the successful prosecution of the first Gulf War, America seemed triumphant; at the very least, as the work of Francis Fukuyama indicated, she was certainly triumphalist. Yet the victory, if not the crowing that accompanied it, was illusory, based as it was on twin pillars of sand. For the two facts that appeared to underpin American hegemony – irresistible American values and invincible American strength – have proved sadly fragile.
The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon may have been less starkly memorable than the atrocities in New York, but it was no less freighted with symbolism: in the past few years a crater has been blown in the walls of American power, and the limitations of American force have been painfully demonstrated. For years in Iraq, a basketcase that remains unstable, the full might of the US military was confounded by a guerrilla insurgency both heterogeneous and primitive; in Afghanistan US forces are mired in bloody but inconclusive combat while the American-sponsored government remains impotent outside Kabul.
Embroiled in these conflicts with no clear end in sight, the world’s only superpower must stand by powerless as Russia recovers its imperial status, Pakistan slips into turmoil and a Holocaust-denying Iranian president strives for nuclear weapons. Worst of all, even this portrait of a burdened and faltering superpower will soon be far too charitable. The meteoric rise of China, dramatized at their Olympics and evidenced more substantially in her neo-colonial programme for Africa, denotes a return to a multi-polar world of competing great powers that would not be entirely foreign to Metternich or Bismarck. America is not only suffering under Kipling’s burden; she will soon have it snatched from her back.
Coupled with this material wane is something still more disheartening. America has always represented an ideal more than military might, and the latter were conspicuously absent when that ideal was first proclaimed. Yet as the iron fist of American power has begun to rust, so the velvet glove of American principles has begun to fray. Pace the placards of priggish protesters, America’s recent wars have been about sowing the seeds of liberty as well as securing oil. As the enduring dominance of autocratic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere demonstrates, those seeds have fallen on barren ground. The presence of democracy, indeed, has been as damning as its absence – the electoral success of Hamas, Hezbollah and Ahmedinejad shows non-Western peoples having mordant fun at the American idealists’ expense.
As America’s values have foundered abroad they have been diminished at home for the sake of wiretapping, water-boarding and Guantanamo Bay. Worst of all, however, the most seminal creed of the new millennium has not been the liberal capitalism that should have ended history but a mediaevalist perversion of Islam that abhors everything America stands for. More than ever before, perhaps, the American ideal resembles the ‘bleached skeleton’ Lawrence imagined it to be . . .
read:
http://www.thecommentfactory.com/barack-obama-will-be-oversee-the-waning-of-the-american-superpower-1516my note:
There are those in government and elsewhere in America who will insist that the U.S. needs to project it's influence behind the force of our military. At the least, there is a majority who believe that the U.S. should maintain a posture and a reality as a 'superpower' which holds ultimate military superiority (if not dominance) over the rest of the nations of the world.
It is from that assumed position of military superiority that the next administration will couch it's arguments and disagreements with policies and actions by nations like Iran, Syria, China, and Russia. Yet, the invasions and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that the destabilizing effects of militarized regime change can outweigh and scuttle whatever resulting 'democratic' gains desired and can fuel and foster even more violent resistance to our presence abroad, our interests, and our allies.
I'm interested in hearing examples of where folks feel there is an opportunity for the new administration to offer different and more rational levers of influence when projecting our interests and ambitions abroad. What 'power' or 'strength' which doesn't rely on our military force can we reasonably expect Pres. Obama to project which has the potential to influence our foes away from objectionable activities as well as satisfy our allies?
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