America and the Art of the Possible by Christopher Buskirk

Author:Christopher Buskirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books

5

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS UNDOUBTEDLY THE AMERICAN century, but that wasn’t clear at the outset. Great Britain still ruled an empire on which the sun never set, and led the world in commerce. France was prosperous and secure, with her own overseas colonies, and was regarded as the world’s cultural capital in the Belle Époque. This was also the first great era of globalization, and the rivalries it stirred up ended in war. America’s industrial might, along with a decisive role in determining the outcome of World War I, secured her place among the great powers.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, America’s role in the world looked as secure as Britain’s had seemed a century before. The Cold War was won, a peace dividend was being spent, and liberalism appeared to be spreading around the world. The End of History was declared. American economists, consultants, and agencies like USAID spent the 1990s showing former communist countries how to run their governments and economies the American way. It would be a sort of Marshall Plan 2.0.

And that was the problem. Solutions devised for the challenges of another time and place were updated with a bit of monetarism here and some public choice economics there. They were then promoted with far too much self-congratulation and too little understanding of the contexts in which they were being applied. A nation’s history, culture, religion, folkways, even its geography were largely ignored.

America’s foreign policy since 1945 has rested on a belief that the future of all countries should be a variant of American liberalism and that America’s role in the world is to bring that future into being. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to confirm the correctness of this mission, but it led to a dangerous hubris. America has been crusading around the world, using our military to remake it in our image—engaging in wars, military interventions, coups, and color revolutions far and wide, with diminishing success and compounding cost. All this has sapped the national vitality. The messianic conception of America’s role in the world is a product of twentieth-century conditions and is at odds with the historic American idea. President James Monroe succinctly described America’s historic conception of itself and its place in the world:

Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.