America is still the nation whose eyes say ‘yes’
Douglas Murray tours a country despondent about its presidential race and increasingly uncertain about Barack Obama. Yet the world still needs America’s strengths Chicago In front of me at the University of Chicago, and several times my height, is a stone carving of a half-human deity from the Assyrian empire. All round this exhibition on ancient Iraq are towering artefacts from lost cities and faded empires. The whole is overshadowed by a room featuring the Baghdad looting of 2003. Beside me, a father tries to answer a question from his son: ‘What happened to Babylon?’ The father attempts to explain how empires ebb and flow — how armies rise and fall.
The fall of empires was already on my mind because I had come from Washington where I had been with some of the people now perennially described as the ‘architects’ of the Iraq war. It was not only being with those now out of the Bush administration that created a state of dejection in the air. Talking with Republicans and Democrats, listening to the flagging disciples of Obama and the resigned party-allies of McCain, it seems from the capital that a more than seasonal torpor hangs in the late summer air.
This is in part because of a presidential race that already feels interminable. Then there is the fact that conservatives feel saddled with a presidential candidate about whom few can find it in themselves to be enthusiastic — as McCain’s fund-raising efforts go some way to demonstrating. Add to that the expected if wearying late-administration legal suits and scandals. All combine to create in Republicans a resignation to the fact that the other side probably has 1 P to win sometimes and that this might just be their go. Many Republicans are even considering the unthinkable — a Democrat sweep which will see them running the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. Amid the gloom of what this would mean for the party is the occasional concomitant flicker of pleasure: the embittered hope that the Democrats do indeed get the lot, so that they can properly, royally, screw it up for all the world to see, thus providing the turf on which the Republican party would regrow. Even late at night though, when such desperate consolations might be voiced, it is with the realisation that it is a low, unworthy instinct — one which would be forgivable only if the scorched-earth policy did not necessarily involve a Democratic president who may indeed be likely to, well, scorch the earth.
It has taken time, but recent polls putting Obama and McCain a mere percentage point apart in national ratings finally show the bump to earth of the unreal expectations surrounding Obama. It is not only the demonstrable imbalance of election coverage in the US — let alone foreign — media in Obama’s favour that has too thinly stretched his appeal. There has also been what might be seen as a defining moment — the disastrously hyped, hubristic and ahistorical Berlin speech. This seems to have given McCain an unlikely boost, and meant the light of inquiry has finally landed on Obama’s rhetoric.
After all, what, people are finally asking, are most of his speeches, let alone the catchphrases, actually about? It requires a heart of stone not to titter at Obama trying to draw grand-sweep lessons from the Berlin airlift and arriving, with some spectacular twists of logic, to the conclusion that ‘the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny’. Most observers would not draw that conclusion even in the first ten lessons from American and German encounters in the last century.
Ennui at the slightly presumptuous, postnational ‘citizen of the world’ rhetoric of Obama is being felt in the polls as well, with the Pew Research Centre recently showing that 51 per cent of independent voters feel they have been ‘hearing too much’ about the Democratic candidate.
His impossibly vague promises might seem an obvious palliative to America’s current condition — to non-Americans apparently most of all. But for a nation which knows well how important the right individual is at the right time, Obama actually ticks relatively few boxes. His skin colour, so trumpeted in Europe, seems hardly an issue here. What is, is his preparedness.
As the race approaches the serious postconvention stage, even non-Clintonite Democrats must be aware that they have pitched the future of their party, as well as their nation, into the hands of an ‘if that’s your thing then that’s your thing’ crowdpleaser more untested than perhaps any previous finalist in the race for the presidency. A clean slate may be attractive for PR purposes, but for running the world’s hyper-power it’s not good. In any case the slate doesn’t, and can’t, stay clean long. Obama’s kneejerk reactions to foreign policy questions on the campaign trail are not auspicious. Indeed it sometimes looks like Obama is set on making the same mistakes, in the same order, and (witness the necromantic return of Zbigniew Brzezinski) even with some of the same people, as Jimmy Carter. Such a retread could be disastrous and haunting for his party’s attempt to recover any reputation as a manager of foreign affairs — for, as the Bush administration has shown, it is on foreign affairs that administrations are judged today.
Washington’s current tiredness cannot be divorced from the story of Iraq. The town is now littered with people whose predictive abilities failed them and, arguably, America. Those who predicted swift victory in Iraq have been especially ridiculed. But with the success of the surge so too have those like Obama and the Republican senator Chuck Hagel, who predicted that the surge would be ‘the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam’. They too have had their crystal balls fingered, and if the lesson that the American people should trust a little less in prophets and wise men is not entirely unwelcome, a turn against a muscular and ethical foreign policy most certainly would be.
You don’t have to go back far to find where public opinion in America falls at such times. In April 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, a Gallup poll revealed that only 37 per cent of the American people would be willing to send troops if England were attacked, and only 11 per cent would have sent troops to Israel if the same circumstance arose. As Darfur will continue to show, America not exercising power is the only thing the world dislikes as much as her exercising it.
Nowadays outside America you hear it perpetually stated, more with relish than sorrow I think, that China is rising, that India is growing, that we are entering what Fareed Zakaria has called ‘the Post-American World’. Yet it is important to note that the world that Zakaria describes is not, as he says, ‘about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else’. On current trends it is not by any means certain that these, or any, powers will eclipse America. Rather they will provide it with competition — a competition through which America has traditionally thrived.
Russia’s recently renewed expression of military power shows that things have, as another American author recently put it, become normal again. It is the period we just left that was unusual.
Meanwhile, growing economies around the world look to America not as a rival but as an example. A 2005 Pew poll showed that only America had a more favourable view of America than India did. And just as America’s economic model remains the basis for all global economic successes, so its political system and ideals remain the only ideals which tyrannical regimes must either answer or, by necessity, silence. It is more than usually common today in Washington to hark back to the Founders — the greatest minds America has produced, because they were the minds that produced America. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), Thomas Jefferson was riding with a party across the new land. Coming to a river, they met a man who watched all Jefferson’s companions head across the water before asking the President to take him across on his horse. Jefferson agreed. Once he was set down on the other side, Jefferson’s companions berated the stranger. What did he think he was doing? Didn’t he know that was the President? The man, ignorant of who had carried him across, explained simply: ‘I looked into all your eyes and they said “no”. I looked into his and they said “yes”.’ America is undergoing a period of selfanalysis, perhaps even a useful period of selfdoubt. But it is not unusual or unhealthy for this nation to look inwards. When it casts its eyes out again after the autumn elections, whoever leads it will see a world that still needs American power and still admires America’s core values. Whoever takes office in January will survey a world in which America remains the pre-eminent nation and the litmus of freedom — the country which the rest of the world looks to, and whose eyes still say ‘yes’.
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