By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Faced with the great challenge of his time — the
thermonuclear menace of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — Jack Kennedy
famously laid out the American position: “We shall pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to
assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge — and
more.”
That was heady stuff — but exhausting, too, and
expensive. Americans tire of heroism pretty quickly. We are the weary
kind, and the weariness is thoroughly
bipartisan: Kennedy’s determination to fight the Cold War was met with
opposition not only from the Left, which was sympathetic to the Soviet Union,
but also from the Right, with some conservatives of the old school taking to
heart Randolph Bourne’s dictum that “war is the health of the state” and
believing that what they saw as imperialism abroad was inexorably linked to
imperialism at home. And both sides coveted the money that was being spent,
calculating that we could fill a lot of potholes in Poughkeepsie for the cost
of an aircraft carrier or three. The Walter Mondale Democrats and the Ron Paul
Republicans saw eye to eye on that, at least.
That dynamic has not changed much: Barack Obama
complained about the money the George W. Bush administration spent chasing
jihadists around the world and declared, “America, it is time to focus on
nation-building at home.” Donald Trump’s embarrassing nickel-and-dime attitude
toward U.S. commitments abroad, from NATO to USAID, is the barstool version of
Obama’s schoolboy posturing. But, of course, we are Americans, we are restless,
we like a fight, and we cannot actually mind our own business for very long.
Our method is to get ourselves into a fight, grow bored with it, become
agitated by the expense of keeping it up, and then retreat in a huff.
That makes for a peculiar politics on the Right,
especially, as conservatives make like a guy trying to pat his head and rub his
belly at the same time, simultaneously beating their chests and pinching
pennies. On 24 June 2019, Sean Hannity lamented that President Trump had failed
to follow through on his insane proposal to hijack Iraqi oil output, which
Hannity proposed using to compensate the families of American soldiers who died
in the American invasion and occupation of Iraq at a rate of “millions of
dollars per family.” Warming to his theme but never quite managing to call his
proposal “tribute,” the AM-radio moral philosopher concluded “We have every
right to force you to pay for your own liberation.”
Us pay any price, bear any burden? No, you
will pay any price, and you will bear any burden we damned well tell you to,
buddy.
Kennedy laid out an invitation to ancient friends and new
cooperators alike:
To those old allies whose cultural
and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends.
United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures.
Divided, there is little we can do–for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at
odds and split asunder.
To those new States whom we welcome
to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control
shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We
shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. . . . To those
peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds
of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for
whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not
because we seek their votes, but because it is right.
That is . . . not exactly how we talk about those
things today.
It is easy to criticize President Trump for his pettiness
— in rhetoric and in fact — but he is not the cause of American surrender, only
its symptom. It is impossible to blame the American people for their weariness.
For one thing, the critics of JFK-style imperialism and those Poughkeepsie
pothole-watchers are not without a point: There is an economic and a moral
price to be paid for that kind of leadership, and government should, in most
ordinary times, be mainly preoccupied with those potholes and not with dreaming
up new crusades through which to aggrandize itself and its officers. And didn’t
Hercules himself, sometime between killing the Nemean lion and that unpleasant
Augean housekeeping business, look over his shoulder and mutter about the
unfairness of it all, and wonder aloud why the . . . Belgians . . .
weren’t shouldering more of the burden? “They have been very unfair to us,” I
am sure he said.
The coronavirus epidemic is a global problem, one that
points to the current deficit in global leadership. Americans are paralyzed by
resentment. The European Union, having just been gutted by the departure of the
United Kingdom, does not know quite what to do, and those European universal
health-care systems so admired by U.S. progressives are failing. China has just
reminded the world that it is a socially backward gulag state that is stalled
right there between Mexico and Bulgaria in real economic performance. Putin
is the czar of Twitter trolls. The U.S. president has two pornographic
films, six bankruptcies, and a game show on his curriculum vitae, and
the country is so short of emergency supplies that Ralph Lauren is making
medical garments and Tito’s is producing hand sanitizer instead of vodka — not
exactly in a position to exercise global leadership.
With the prominent exception of the European Union and a
few relatively minor exceptions (ASEAN, OIC, etc.), the success of the
prominent multilateral institutions of the post-war era depended to an
extraordinary degree upon the willingness of the United States to carry them,
applying its vast wealth, military power, and credibility to their missions.
The United States is, at least for the moment, no longer as willing to do that
as it once was — our relationship with NATO in the Trump era is indicative of a
deeper and broader change in our national orientation. This is the age of the
Little American, who turns up his nose at the world and asks, “What’s in it for
me?”
The absence of American leadership in the current crisis
is not an aberration, and it is not temporary. This is the new world order,
light on the order.
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