While America Slept
By Andrew Roberts
Spectator.org
"I do not think America is going to smash,” Winston Churchill told his
American stockbroker in the depths of the Great Depression. “On the
contrary I believe that they will quite soon begin to recover…. They
carved it out of the prairie and the forests. They are going to have a
strong national resurgence in the near future.”
Churchill’s own belief in the massive regenerative power of the United
States was a constant in his life. He believed that given the will,
Americans could achieve anything, because America was special. Yet today
it is precisely this trust in the exceptionalism of America that is
currently being called into question. History shows that nations that
retain self-belief are indeed capable of astonishing feats, but those
that suspect their time in the sun has passed cannot be saved, however
rich they are or successful they have been.
Joyce Carol Oates, the award-winning novelist and Princeton professor,
has written in the Atlantic: “How heartily sick the world has grown, in
the first… years of the 21st century, of the American idea! Speak with
any non-American, travel to any foreign country, and the consensus is:
The American idea has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose
bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids, consequently low on natural
testosterone, deranged and myopic, dangerous.” Such searing hatred of
the American Idea from within American society—indeed from inside its
cultural elite—is far more dangerous than what non-Americans feel. Of
course, it couldn’t matter less what one writer feels if she does not
represent the zeitgeist, but much more worrying was President Barack
Obama’s reply in April to a question from a Financial Times reporter
about whether he believed in American exceptionalism. He said: “I
believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits
believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek
exceptionalism.”
This is reminiscent of what the Dodo says in Alice in Wonderland:
“Everyone has won and all must have prizes.” Yet that is simply not how
international relations work. Greeks might indeed believe in their own
exceptionalism, as might Belgians, Thais, or Finns for that matter, but
they are not truly exceptional in the light of global current affairs.
The West once again looks to America for leadership in a risky world, as
we so often have in the past. Although the U.S. economy was in recession
in the second quarter of 2009, she pulled out of it in the third
quarter. My country, Britain, is still heavily mired in recession, but
nothing so cheers our markets as much as knowing that you are finally
out of it. American optimism, free market beliefs, and the can-do spirit
will raise the Western world out of these doldrums—at least, they will
if they are permitted to by your Congress and administration.
Historians will long debate how this recession started and who was
responsible—the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Alan Greenspan’s interest rate
policies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending strategy, Hank Paulson’s
stewardship of the Treasury, all will be investigated by what Churchill
once called “the pitiless inquest of History”—but however we got into
it, only a resurgent America can get us out the other side. Yet with net
private investment at 0.1 percent of U.S. GDP in the second quarter of
2009, and the U.S. deficit in 2009 standing at $1.4 trillion, the
question the world is asking is: does America retain the belief in her
exceptionalism, as in earlier times? All true friends of America must
pray that the answer is yes, but if President Obama’s statement is
anything to go by, it might be no.
SO IN A RISKY WORLD, where the hegemony of the English-speaking
peoples—necessarily led by America—is increasingly being encroached upon
by China, India, the European Union, and other powers, will America
continue to provide the global leadership she always has, ever since she
erupted onto the global stage a century ago? For it was in 1909 that
Teddy Roosevelt visited Hampton Roads in Virginia to witness the return,
after a 14-month, 45,000-mile circumnavigation of the world, of the
Great White Fleet.
On board the presidential yacht Mayflower, Roosevelt watched seven miles
of bright white ships— they were painted battle-gray soon after—as they
fired a 21-gun salute in his honor. “We have definitely taken our place
among the world great powers,” he said afterward, and he was right. The
places that the Fleet had visited subtly underlined this important new
fact of global geopolitics. From Chesapeake Bay, the 16 battleships had
steamed to the Caribbean, past the new possessions of Cuba and Puerto
Rico, then down the east coast and up the west coast of South America,
protected by the Monroe Doctrine. Each country of the Latin American
part of the world cruise at which the Fleet stopped—including Brazil,
Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico—could have harbored any illusions
about what this massive new force portended.
After Mexico, the Fleet visited Hawaii (annexed by the U.S. in July
1898), New Zealand, and Australia, China, the (American-owned)
Philippines, and then Japan. It then sailed across the Indian Ocean,
through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, and then across the
Atlantic. As a historian of America’s explosion onto the world scene
recorded: “The cruise not only impressed the world with America’s
newfound military strength, but excited the imagination of Americans as
well. A million people had turned out in San Francisco to welcome the
ships before their voyage across the Pacific.” There was no talk then of
Greek exceptionalism being something that could be equated with
American.
So where are we a century—indeed “the American century”—later? All too
often in history, it has been the challenge of a small, seemingly
insignificant power that has shown up the cracks in a great nation,
which has in turn led to the loss of hegemony and the loss of greatness.
Serbia was tiny compared to the Austro- Hungarian Empire in 1914, yet
its challenge eventually brought the Habsburgs to their knees. The
French Empire dissolved after its defeat by Indochina at Dien Bien Phu
in 1954. Two years later, the once-mighty British Empire came to grief
at Suez at the hands of puny Egypt. Afghanistan saw the beginning of the
end of the Soviet Empire only 10 years after the Christmas 1979
invasion. America must not allow that same country—Afghanistan—to sound
the death knell of American greatness, of American exceptionalism. She
did not allow the disaster in Vietnam—where she lost 55,000 dead, well
over 10 times more than in Iraq and Afghanistan put together—to deflect
her.
For do not think that America’s great wealth will save her, if she loses
the willpower to be exceptional. The possession of high per capita
incomes does not save empires that no longer believe in themselves.
History is littered with examples. The Romans were richer than the Huns,
the Ottomans than the Mongols, the Aztecs than the Conquistadores, the
Romanovs than the Bolsheviks, the British than the Indian National
Congress, and so it goes on. It did none of these empires any good once
they had lost their self-belief.
YET ALTHOUGH THE CHALLENGES FACED by the English-speaking peoples today
are undeniably challenging, they are hardly unique. History might not
repeat itself, but it does occasionally rhyme. The War on Terror would
be instantly recognizable to the great leaders of the Englishspeaking
peoples of the past. Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would have
heard in the overarching ambitions of the jihadists for a caliphate
stretching from Spain to Indonesia an echo of the Wilhelmine ambitions
that led to the first great assault on the English-speaking peoples in
1914. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt would also have seen in the
viciousness and ruthlessness of the Taliban a shadow of the swastika
that fell across Europe from 1933 to 1945. Harry Truman, JFK, Ronald
Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher would have no difficulty in spotting the
similarities between al Qaeda’s creed of universality with the Marxist
dialectical claim of the Soviet Communists to eventual world domination.
What we are witnessing today is nothing less than the fourth great
assault on the primacy of the English-speaking peoples from aggressive
totalitarian belief systems. The methods might be different each time,
but the mindset hasn’t changed. Yet what I fear might have changed is a
growing unwillingness of the elites of the English-speaking peoples to
continue paying the price for their liberty. The sunset clause President
Obama put on his latest surge at his West Point speech is the latest
example of this unwillingness.
If the United States does not provide the kind of leadership in our
risky world that was provided by Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Truman,
JFK, Reagan, and Thatcher, and which one day—especially in the field of
homeland security—will be accorded to President Bush and Tony Blair,
then we must tremble for the future. For America to listen to the siren
voices of isolationism and to withdraw into herself— perhaps citing
Washington’s Farewell Address as she does so—would be utterly disastrous
for our planet in the 21st century. Power abhors a vacuum, and America’s
withdrawal would soon be followed by the emergence of another nation
that would not exhibit a fraction of America’s decency, fairness, and
veneration for the popular will.
Nor her self-sacrifice: the tale is told of Lyndon Johnson in 1966
asking Charles de Gaulle, when France left NATO in 1966 and demanded the
removal of all American bases from French soil: “Does your order include
the bodies of American soldiers in France’s cemeteries?” (There are
30,922 Americans from the First World War buried in France and 93,245
from the Second.) On D-Day itself, American lost 2,500 killed, Britain
1,641, Canada 359, and there were Australians and New Zealanders too.
Indeed, the English-speaking peoples took 98.4 percent of the military
casualties liberating France that day, despite the fact that in June
1944 the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia faced no
conceivable threat of invasion from Germany.
WHEN IT COMES TO THE great power that might take America’s place as the
21st century’s hegemon, consider the field. There is the European Union,
with its 500 million population, its profound anti-American prejudice,
its endemic corruption—its auditors haven’t signed off its accounts in
more than a decade—and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the
European project. Would Americans want the French and Germans to replace
them and be bathed in the warm limelight of History’s favor? Or there’s
China, a vicious totalitarian regime that treats its own massive
population with cruelty and contempt, and would undoubtedly treat any
other subject people worse, as the Tibetans’ experience proves. Perhaps
the least bad would be India, which at least has similar political and
legal systems, the rule of law and democracy, and 18 percent of whose
people speak English, all thanks to the careful two-century stewardship
of the British Empire. Yet can one really see India acting
altruistically in areas of the world where her immediate self-interest
is not evident, because her Founding Fathers imbued her nation with a
noble and all-encompassing mission, as America’s did?
When American hegemony disappears—and, in the words of the hymnal, all
of “Earth’s proud empires pass away”—the world will be a poorer and much
more dangerous place. Nor is it the case that the election of President
Obama will defuse the anti- Americanism to which Joyce Carol Oates so
gloatingly referred. Despite his outrageously premature Nobel Peace
Prize and his global friendship tours, the eternal verities of global
Realpolitik cannot be gainsaid. Wealth, success, and greatness lead to
envy and thus hatred; it is an inevitable part of the human condition.
The reason the Belgians, Thais, Finns, and those oh-so-exceptional
Greeks are not hated today is simply that they are not powerful enough
to warrant it. But consider the experience of the Roman Empire, the
British Empire, indeed every top-dog power in history. “I never spend
five minutes in inquiring if we are unpopular,” the Viceroy of India,
Lord Curzon, wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, in
1900. “The answer is written in red ink on the map of the globe. No, I
would count everywhere on the individual hostility of all the great
Powers, but would endeavour to arrange things that they were not united
against me. I would be as strong in small things as well as big.”
The way that the United States can ensure that the world is never united
against her is to abide by the spirit of the Special Relationship. I’ve
lost count of the number of times that I’ve read the obituaries of
people who have written obituaries of the Special Relationship, yet it
is thankfully still with us, as is America’s special relationship with
the rest of the English-speaking peoples. If one looks at the forces
presently deployed in Afghanistan—i.e., in the vanguard of the struggle
between civilization and barbarism in our world today—you see 98,000
American troops and 35,000 from the rest of NATO, of which the British
make up the second largest element, with 10,000, then the Germans (in
the safest province), but after that the Canadians, who have taken the
larger per capita proportion of casualties, and there have been special
forces contingents from faraway Australia and New Zealand, even though
they are not in NATO. (This is one place where Greek exceptionalism does
come into play, in that there are exceptionally few Greeks in
Afghanistan.)
As Churchill put it: “It is the English-speaking peoples who, almost
alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom. These things are a powerful
incentive to collaboration. With nations, as with individuals, if you
care deeply for the same things, and these things are threatened, it is
natural to work together to preserve them.” Today, we in Britain fear
that President Obama has little or no time for the Special Relationship.
One of his acts on entering the Oval Office was to return the bust of
Churchill given by the British embassy in the wake of 9/11 back to the
embassy. More seriously, he canceled the European missile shield. Teddy
Roosevelt and Lord Salisbury, Churchill and FDR, Macmillan and JFK,
Reagan and Thatcher, and Bush and Blair have defined the Special
Relationship, but nothing like that closeness exists between Obama and
Gordon Brown. We must hope that Obama and David Cameron get on once the
Conservatives win the 2010 election in Britain, for in this risky world
we both need the Special Relationship.
“AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM is not just something that Americans claim for
themselves,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute has
pointed out. “Historically, Americans have been different as a people,
even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m
thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t
seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the
peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in
America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of
resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European
countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And
then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature
of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they
are in control of their own destinies.”
It is that assumption, that sense of mastery of their own fates, that I
fear might be faltering in modern America, and if so it will be the
forerunner of a world historical tragedy, not just for America and the
rest of the English-speaking peoples, but ultimately for the whole
world. With the risks facing us today, American leadership is needed as
much as ever before. America should hold on to her exceptionalism, never
apologize for the American Idea, and be proud of the fact that you do
things differently there.