Decline is a choice. But is it America's choice?
By: Charles Krauthammer
OpEd Contributor
October 26, 2009
First of two parts. Tomorrow: Retreat abroad begins at home.
The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.
On the other side of this debate are a few -- notably Josef Joffe in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs -- who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. They note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China (and perhaps India) is just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-Fran?ois Revel's "How Democracies Perish."
The anti-declinists point out, for example, that the fear of China is overblown. It's based on the implausible assumption of indefinite, uninterrupted growth; ignores accumulating externalities like pollution (which can be ignored when growth starts from a very low baseline, but ends up making growth increasingly, chokingly difficult); and overlooks the unavoidable consequences of the one-child policy, which guarantees that China will get old before it gets rich.
And just as the rise of China is a straight-line projection of current economic trends, American decline is a straight-line projection of the fearful, pessimistic mood of a country war-weary and in the grip of a severe recession.
Among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline -- or continued ascendancy -- is in our hands.
Not that decline is always a choice. Britain's decline after World War II was foretold, as indeed was that of Europe, which had been the dominant global force of the preceding centuries. The civilizational suicide that was the two world wars, and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion, made continued dominance impossible and decline inevitable.
The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We -- whom Lincoln once called God's "almost chosen people" -- did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world's co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon -- and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.
Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course toward the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States -- controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture -- has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.
The current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. It begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance. In Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Interesting response. Because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.
Indeed, as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional -- exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples.
With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guant?namo, for unilateralism and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
Quite an indictment, the fundamental consequence of which is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership. According to the new dispensation, having forfeited the mandate of heaven -- if it ever had one -- a newly humbled America now seeks a more modest place among the nations, not above them.
For the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. It is that America itself is corrupt -- in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. And because we remain so imperfect a nation, we are in no position to dictate our professed values to others around the world.
Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue because, he says openly, of our own alleged transgressions towards Iran (presumably involvement in the 1953 coup). Our shortcomings are so grave, and our offenses both domestic and international so serious, that we lack the moral ground on which to justify hegemony.
These fundamental tenets of the New Liberalism are not just theory. They have strategic consequences. Thus, for example, there is no more "Global War on Terror." It's not just that the term has been abolished or that the secretary of homeland security refers to terrorism as "man-caused disasters." It is that the very idea of our nation and civilization being engaged in a global mortal struggle with jihadism has been retired as well.
This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the na?ve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory -- as policy -- has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. But that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.
In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline -- to make America essentially one nation among many.
This article -- condensed from The Weekly Standard -- is based on syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer's 2009 Wriston Lecture delivered for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York on Oct. 5.
