Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twentieth in his new series on the Obama era.
It can be argued that the wise deployment of American power is indispensable to the peace and stability of the world. But the question that comes slamming back, of course, is: When has that ever happened?
Answer: Probably not since the Second World War. And certainly not since the late ’40s, when the vast expansion of the US military-industrial complex engineered by FDR a decade earlier to bring overwhelming US force to bear in two different theatres of war at once, was re-adrenalized in peace time by Americans’ alarm at Stalin acquiring the atomic bomb and Mao Tse-Tung’s seizure of China.
Canny business interests effectively used that alarm to turn the US into a national security state. And so there followed, inexorably, the spendthrift engagements of the artificially hyped ‘Cold War’; the needless US rush into Korea (quickly stalemated, not by the dreaded Soviet Union, after all, but by China, pouring its own troops into the North); the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the quagmire of Vietnam, a land of rice fields in which the US had absolutely no strategic interests at stake but where nonetheless — feverishly engaged by now in the phantasmagoric task of ‘fighting Communism’ — it managed significantly to deplete its treasury, even as it went right on enriching the same military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower had futilely warned.
Finally, in recent times, the post-Cold War rush by the two Bushes, father and son, to free up the new American oligarchy to make a killing as never before, and to control the Middle East’s oil, abruptly brought imperial America to the very edge of economic collapse, and quite destroyed the staggering superpower’s moral standing in the world.
So it was probably in the late ’40s that the US crossed the Rubicon, the republic silently succumbed, and the empire tragically bloomed — though prescient souls had seen this coming for some time. As early as 1926, the American poet Robinson Jeffers had published his great elegy for the country envisaged by its founding fathers:
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire,/…I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to /make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth./ Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother…Shine, perishing republic.
And so it was that, last Thursday, Roger Cohen’s NYT column, ‘America Agonistes,’ read like a progress report, 60 years on, on the doomed trajectory of imperial America.
“Pax Americana,” wrote Cohen, “unlovely but effective, has endured for more than 60 years… but, as General Motors has discovered, history moves on. GM, in fact, is not a bad emblem for this moment when the world’s tectonic plates are plainly on the move. No corporation ever symbolized American might with greater vividness… Now it is all but bankrupt.”
Cohen sees American capitalism as “on trial, the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions exhausted. From this wreckage, this ending, the Group of 20 must trace the contours of a 21st Century global economy. The task embarked on here in London… has begun in the same week as NATO leaders meet in France and Germany to mark the Atlantic Alliance’s 60th birthday. These gatherings both mark America’s changing place in the world.”
America’s current vulnerability, he muses, “is not confined to the economic sphere. Its treasure depleted, its dominance eroded, its standing questioned, America cannot forever bankroll the security of the world.” And Cohen goes on, as he must, to consider “the troubled Afghan mission.”
Strikingly, Cohen’s only hope that America can manage its necessary downsizing now in a constructive and orderly manner resides in a single individual: Barack Obama.
“Fortunately,” he concludes, “this most cosmopolitan of US presidents is well suited to the task. A guiding intelligence has replaced a guiding anger [he might have said thuggishness] at the White House.”
One takes his point. Obama is probably the only US president in living memory who could sit on a verandah with the likes of you and me, reader, and not wind up striking us as an hubristic Innocent Abroad. He’s surely the only US president who wouldn’t need prepping in order to hold up his end of a conversation that flitted from, say, Soweto to Bahia to Marseilles.
Moreover, Obama is staunchly supported by most Americans, to whom — as with Cohen — he represents the lone light in their overcast sky. In vain so far has the US media anticipated the end of his ‘honeymoon’; most Americans trust Obama, and the US media will just have to get used to that fact.
It’s a fact easily missed by the outside observer; that same media, which thrives on ‘conflict,’ still gives so much air time to the anti-Obama rage of Republicans — including rightwing talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh and his fellow-demagogic buffoons — that you’d need to know that talk radio’s demographic comprises overwhelmingly the over-60s, or to read last week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, to realize how ‘fringe’ such voices have become.
(In that poll, 80 per cent of respondents blamed US financial institutions, not Obama, for America’s economic meltdown; two-thirds approved of the way Obama was handling the presidency; and the percentage who opined that the US was now “heading in the right direction” had already tripled from those who’d said the same thing in the dying days of Bush.)
Even so, it’s an awesome burden to put on the shoulders of one man: to hope that he can change the course of history. And additionally, there’s a caveat, the part of Obama that’s irrefrangibly ‘American,’ the part that’s currently doubling down on the US’s commitment of troops and treasure to Afghanistan, say.
But that’s the drama that, in London, Paris and beyond, the world is currently watching: whether, single-handedly and simultaneously, Obama can both manage the downsizing of his nation’s place in the world and restore it to a leadership role (‘a,’ not ‘the’) in the community of nations.
If, as Heraclitus averred, a man’s character is his fate, it can be argued that Obama’s character, forged by the unlikely circumstances of his background and upbringing, has uniquely prepared him for a moment like this. Still, wouldn’t you just know it: that such would be the Herculean tasks facing the US’s first African-American president?
