On America’s Flight From History
For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s military superiority and dominance on the premise and promise, indeed the implicit assumption, that America would be an honorable caretaker and night watchman of the democratic world, sharing the most basic aspirations of that world — which it had, after all, helped to create and foster — namely the perpetuation of some semblance of liberal representative government, the maintenance of institutions dedicated to the rule of law, the peaceful transition of power through secure elections ensuring legitimate popular representation, and a general principle, endemic to and flowing from such liberal democratic practices, of international voluntarism and national self-determination, which is to say an inherent preference for peaceful and non-coercive relations among civilized nations.
The key to the whole arrangement, as noted above, was the continued assumption, on the part of the rest of the alliance, of American good faith in its role as the bulwark of freedom and global insurance against aggression or subversion from this age’s two major threats to liberty and national self-determination, Russia and China. This is not about neoconservative interventionism or “democracy projects.” It is, and has always been, about having a trustworthy big brother in the neighborhood who was tougher than the biggest bullies and would therefore limit their boldness. Contrary to the “America first” idiocy of today’s MAGA myopics, this traditional arrangement, existing since the end of WWII, was not about the U.S. sacrificing their treasure and interests to “save the world.” It was the most prudent and extraordinary example of a foreign policy serving American interests in the most farsighted way.
In this age of totalitarian expansionism and deadly weapons of global reach, old-fashioned isolationism is simply no longer possible or safe. The American policy — and it is essential to remember that it was American policy, not something imposed on the United States from without, except by the vicissitudes of history — was an effort to contain the rising powers most hostile and dangerous to the survival of American freedom and prosperity, by building the widest possible network of free trade zones and likeminded friendly nations, and then to ensure the stable continuity of that network of good-faith trading partners and non-aggressive neighbors (the free world, as it used to be dubbed) by offering to serve as the protective umbrella for the whole, rather than allowing massive military buildups, and worst of all nuclear proliferation, among dozens of democratic countries left desperately trying to defend themselves against much larger and more militarized regional aggressors. The U.S. took on that role of global freedom’s umbrella, paying the bulk of the price and therefore holding most of the decision-making authority, not as a sacrificial act of compassion for smaller nations which “don’t pay their fair share,” but as America’s most rational national security strategy for the age of international warfare, nuclear missiles, and satellite surveillance technology.
Donald Trump’s administration, guided in part by pro-Putin influencers in the MAGA media-intellectual-policy complex, are reneging on that carefully established good-faith preeminence, casting alliances (formal and informal) to the wind by suddenly treating all those nations traditionally affiliated as “the free world” as nothing but so many business rivals, subject, like any rivals perceived as “encroaching on our market share” or “cutting into our profits,” to recriminatory trade wars, legal wrangling over territory, and even hostile takeovers. In this new environment, those relatively advanced and liberal nations that had voluntarily ceded much of their own strength and global clout to the United States on the promise of good-faith shared interests and national defense by proxy, are finding themselves suddenly without their collective umbrella, at a moment when storm clouds are becoming most ominous on the horizon. They have been betrayed. They are being betrayed. They gave up a substantial portion of their national pride and independence in exchange for greater overall safety as provided by a likeminded and more powerful neighbor — a big brother to shield them against the bullies. Today, they find their big brother has turned decisively and unmistakably to the side of the bullies.
America has turned her back on herself, on her better angels, on her past promises and her more profound understanding of the meaning of “national interests” in today’s world. She has ceded her soul to the biggest bullies in the neighborhood after all, in exchange, as we now hear directly in Trump’s rhetoric about “the Western hemisphere,” for being allowed free reign to run roughshod over her own nearby blocks. Only Trump, his administration bootlickers, and his cadre of backers in the MAGA media-intellectual-policy complex, could be so historically illiterate and trivial-minded as to imagine that the bullies, having reduced America to begging for control of her own localized region while surrendering her former, wider realm of principled dominance — the free world as an idea — to the totalitarian aggressors, will be permitted to rule even that reduced portion of things without higher-level controls being exerted, gradually and inexorably, by her superiors in Russia and China. America is gradually handing over most of the world to Russian and Chinese dominance and influence, by reducing former allies to the level of their adversaries through moral equivalency arguments, and the cowardice that inspires such arguments, and then modelling her own new policies towards the world on those of the aggressors she had long restrained through principled assertions of proud strength in defense of freedom.
Freedom is dying on this Earth, and America, which was freedom’s last chance at survival, has chosen in the end to embrace the trend and even become a leading advocate for that trend. She is retreating from history, from the responsibilities bestowed upon her by the trajectory of modern civilization, and from the promise she once represented on this planet but is no longer willing to represent. And that is the key, and the essential point of sadness: America could and should still be what she once was, but she has voluntarily given up, having fallen, through her own vice and ignorance, into the grip of the most appalling and suicidal spasms of shameless lust, greed, and the near-hysterical braggadocio of fear-driven avarice and acquisitiveness. The rest of the world is left wondering what happened to our old friend, our strong ally, our good-faith supporter in self-determination. She sold out — for so, so little.
