Letters to the Editor
DCLaw1
Published Letters: 861 Editor's Choice: 2
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substance vs. perception
[Read the article: The tragic collapse of America's standing in the world]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some unknowably abstract standard of foreign policy "goodness," as juxtaposed against measurable public perception, is largely beside the point. People tend to understand a country's goodness in large part based upon that country's potential, perceived or real. We do not (generally) expect an Ivy League-educated doctor to suddenly start doing meth and randomly killing innocents in the street.
Accordingly, some degree of bias is inherent, but by no means unfair, unexpected, or unwarranted. We should not expect the world to hold us to the moral or humanitarian standards of the 18th Century. Likewise, the tremendous gains in world opinion brought by the end of WWII and the postwar period set a new bar for the standards of a superpower with the means to behave in such a way. Also, we must never discount the effect of messaging and attitude on the interaction of substance and perception. Bush 43 and his swaggering foreign policy team made an explicit point of giving the world the finger, applying its Manichean philosophy to the entire planet, quite bluntly with the Stalinist expression "You're either with us or against us."
This matters. Saying "bring it on" and being literally proud of abdicating cherished international norms against torture and wars of choice - norms that we ourselves played a major role in promoting - matters every bit as much as the guns, bullets, bombs, electrodes, and waterboards themselves.
Which brings me to my next point. In the end, when we're talking politics and foreign policy, it's the perception that matters. Period. Outside of our own individual and collective senses of morality, what we are doing abroad is largely meaningless without an understanding of how that behavior is taken. The whole point is how we are perceived. As others have pointed out exhaustively, our standing in the world has serious, indisputable, and concrete consequences for our well-being as a nation. Arguing that we've always been venal and corrupt and terrible is a fool's errand in this respect, and signals (unwittingly or otherwise) a defeatist message about our potential as a nation.
I have always been proudly patriotic, and for a reason other than some delusion that our nation has always been a force of good in the world. My patriotism stems from knowing that our country has indeed in the past approached its full potential for greatness and good - in faltering bursts, but bursts no less - and still retains in its core an ability to overcome its darker spirits to push the standard of humanity a bit higher yet, while it still has the power and wealth to do so.
I don't feel this way out of any sense that the United States is exceptional in ways other nations are not - we simply have been blessed with the resources and luck to have been given the opportunity to set a strong example. That we have sunk to such anachronistic barbarism, while still jealously clutching the jewels of our wealth and power, is precisely why we have fallen in such poor international esteem.
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William Timberman
[Read the article: The tragic collapse of America's standing in the world]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Those means were also a temptation far more powerful than any the serpent had to offer Adam. To a very great extent, we've succumbed.
Absolutely - interesting how the gifts of power and esteem can be turned so directly into the millstone that drags the powerful back down. Ironic, perhaps, that the immense military and industrial power that we acquired in the WW/postwar period became the shiny, tempting toy that authoritarian elements came to fixate and overvalue, to the point of bringing actual national power and security to the brink of collapse.
It reminds me of the strain about soft power that some bandied about earlier. Bush sympathizers can't conceive of the value of soft power and global public opinion, because they so drastically overvalue hard power. They actually think that our pure military might and triumph of the will can take on any other threat to our security and well-being. It permeates nearly everything they do. Disfunction and disunity in Iraq: pump more troops into the country. Iranian recalcitrance and heated rhetoric: threaten military attack and refuse to engage diplomatically. For every problem we have, the answer is force or threat of force, often in random and meaningless directions, because when your only tool is a hammer of course everything looks like a nail.
Then, in a flip of fortunes one could certainly label "tragic," the pressures mounting from misuse of hard power and neglect of soft power threaten imminently to pull the foundation out from under hard power itself, the entire edifice imploding in upon itself, the rubicon long passed.
I hope we haven't already crossed that point, but rubicons are notoriously invisible except in rear-view mirrors.
(Kitt and Ondelette, thank you for your kind words)