Don't Write Off America

Is America really in decline? Many say yes but it just may not be the time to bet the farm on that outcome. A world without America would be a very different place.

Standpoint:

The decline of America has been long predicted, though rarely with such enthusiasm as in recent times. The election of a president seen as embodying hope, not just for America but the West, should moderate the declinists' fervour, although I doubt if it will. Their will to see America go down is too great, and they can comfort themselves with the hope that the US may be too far gone economically and the rising powers too well advanced for Barack Obama to make too much difference...

What most declinists want is for America to stop being American and for its citizens to transform themselves into full-blown Europeans, with a socialist economy, a pacifist foreign policy and the rest. In other words, the US should recognise itself as a botched enterprise and come home, spiritually speaking, to what the former Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld called "old Europe". To some, the Obama election will seem a first step in that homebound journey, with his closure of Guantánamo, his readiness to talk to Iran, his nuclear disarmament offer to the Russians, his banning of "water-boarding" and encouragement of stem-cell research. I suspect they are wrong. Culturally, politically and psychologically Obama does not strike as me a European manqué - no one from Chicago ever has.

There is something neurotic in Europe's view of the US, something perpetually out of kilter. Think of the crush on Bill Clinton felt by many women, the demonising of Bush and now Obamamania. We seem unable to get a cool, factual grip on the country, one that is free of fashion, inchoate historical resentments or delusions of superiority. Neurotic too - in the sense of arbitrary and unstable - is our view of American culture and society. It is possible to say anything and its opposite about the US and still command instant agreement. They are pinched Puritans and simultaneously sexually depraved, religious maniacs sold out to hedonism and materialism. America is a country of individualist greed and self-seeking, a place where egotism has reached the point where philanthropists publicly vie with one another to throw billions at museums, the arts, medical research, charities and international aid. Its popular culture is crass and degenerate except when it is black or radical. And its tendency towards obesity is as imbecilic as its dedication to the gym...

The excesses of America's home-bred Americanophobes, such as Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal, are almost rational by comparison, in the sense that a revulsion against the self is a natural phenomenon, a sort of legitimate point of view especially in a guilt-ridden Puritanical psychology...

The attempt to write off democracy in America, one of the greatest achievements of humankind (what other country is capable of mounting an election campaign like the one we have just witnessed?) as a self-evident failure, in contrast to the vibrant new protectionist Europe to come, and to obliterate American successes in science and technology, could be dismissed as so extreme as to be irrelevant to the debate...

For a sane view of the USA you have to look to Americans themselves, just as you look to them for the best science, the best orchestras, novelists, architects, art historians and (so I am told) classicists...

Do America's critics actively want to see Russia and China pulling more strings in the world, and America fewer?

...In the Middle East, it may be right to talk more to Iran or Syria, although with all due scepticism and caution. After all, Europe's "wiser-than-thou" diplomacy in the area does not appear to have made a whit of difference to Iran's nuclear development, apart from buying her time for a bit more uranium enrichment. And while our press runs political glamour pieces on President Bashar al-Assad, he remains hand-in-glove with Hizbollah and shows few signs of reforming an odious regime. How safe would you feel in a multipolar world underpinned in the Middle East by a country avid for a nuclear weapon and whose president has religious visions while addressing the United Nations?

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