The Folly and the Glory by Tim Weiner

Author:Tim Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER 8

THIS UNTAMED FIRE

Ever since the end of World War II, exporting democracy had been a principle of American political warfare. Now it was the polestar. Every president had espoused it, each in his own way, some with less faith or force than others, but always with the hope that America would project its predominant power and prevail across the earth. The means and methods were sometimes ugly. The United States had supported more than a few dictators in its struggle against the Kremlin. But its record on human rights beat the Soviet Union’s by any standard, and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were stronger than the ideas of the Communist Manifesto, when the United States lived up to them. Two decades after a long, dark passage—the retreat and defeat of American forces in Vietnam, the decline and fall of President Nixon in the face of impeachment—America appeared ascendant, trailing clouds of glory, and the world was going its way.

At the start of the new century, it seemed the American flag might be planted almost everywhere. Small green shoots of liberty had sprouted in cracked streets once ruled by security forces in steel-toed jackboots and watched over by pitiless commissars surveilling the citizenry. American pressure had helped create some of the fissures and flowerings. The number of democratic nations around the world had increased, slowly but steadily throughout the cold war, and then rapidly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, until, by the summer of 2001, the numbers of autocracies and democracies on earth were roughly equal. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of the world. The arc of justice seemed strong and true and the trend toward freedom irreversible. It was not so.

Five years later, democracy had fallen into a long global recession. It has not recovered since. The rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and free and independent voices in the media flatlined and declined all over the world. As American political warfare gave way to the war on terror, the image of the United States as a force for truth and justice began to dim, and the polarities of global power began to shift away from American dominion.

“Much depends on health and vigor of our own society,” George Kennan had cabled in the Long Telegram of 1946. “The greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” The awful truth was that American democracy began to face that danger in the new century. A disputed presidential election was decided by a politically governed 5-to-4 decision in the Supreme Court. Civil liberties and political rights eroded and the scope of government surveillance grew after 9/11. Economic inequality expanded; the richest 1 percent now owned more wealth than all of the middle class. Public trust in American government plummeted to 17 percent, a historic low. And

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