Reset by Kurt Andersen

Author:Kurt Andersen [Andersen, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-964-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Global Realism

From the 1980s on, America incrementally cured itself of its Vietnam Syndrome, our traumatized and extreme disinclination to use military power overseas: first the invasion of Grenada (1983), then the Gulf War (1991), intervention in the Balkans (1993-1995), and the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001). But our painful Iraqi misadventure has taught us, in what feels like just the right measure, the dangers of international hubris and overreach. Iraq is not the debacle that it was two and three years ago; something sufficiently like victory now seems plausible. And so we are not, thankfully, sinking into some freshly traumatized, paralyzing Iraq Syndrome—more troops are headed for Afghanistan, after all. But we are definitely at the end of the end of Vietnam Syndrome. The pendulum has swung back to something like a sensible middle position.

The utterly international nature of our present economic hell has made it all the scarier. But in the long run I think there will be an upside, too: the meltdown amounts to a spectacular moment of global consciousness, this generation’s version of the Apollo astronauts’ 1968 photograph of the earth from the moon, an unforgettable reminder that all 6.7 billion of us—from Reykjavík to Sacramento, Vladivostok to Athens, Wall Street to Tiananmen—are in this together, deeply and inextricably interdependent. (The sublime always has a bit of terror mixed in.) In particular for Americans, it represents a salutary slap-in-the-face realization that China and we have effectively become a merged economic leviathan, what the historian Niall Ferguson calls “Chimerica.”

Just as Obama had a sense of where we needed to steer before he was elected, so did George W. Bush back in 2000. “If we’re an arrogant nation,” candidate Bush said of his foreign policy vision, “they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us … Our nation stands alone right now … in terms of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble … One way for us to end up being viewed as the Ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, ‘We do it this way, so should you.’”

In this new age, we need to be confident but not crazily overconfident, proud but not boastful, daring but not … dicks. This country has always had an iffy relationship with humility. President John Quincy Adams was a founding imperialist. “North America,” he said, is “destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation.” But as an older man, he also warned against imperial overreach: “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

So now we are faced with a paradoxical, almost oxy-moronic national challenge: to operate as a superpower with humility and magnanimity. The right choice is neither a bullying America-rules moralism nor a weenie-ish blame-America moralism. Rather, it’s to temper our longstanding sense of righteous superiority with our equally hardwired matter-of-factness—to maintain a clear-eyed view of what’s practical and sensible, to avoid believing our own bullshit.

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