Americans Destined to be Losers
We at Medienkritik have decided to translate a piece by Jan Ross of Die Zeit to give our readers a feel for the current strain of elitist thought on the United States in German media. Because they can no longer credibly claim that Iraq is the worst debacle-crisis-disaster in history, the current financial downturn has given Germany’s Down-on-America crowd a long sought-after implement with which to bash their favorite target. (They also likely see this as one final window of opportunity to kick Bush while he is down. What ever will they do without Bush to blame for all the world’s problems?)
Of course this is nothing revolutionary in European thought – being very much in the vein of Emmanuel Todd’s “After the Empire.”Those wishing to contact the editors of Die Zeit with comments on this article may email them at: kommentare@zeit.de (We ask readers to please keep all correspondence civil and respectful). Here is our translation:
“The United States: Heroes of the Retreat
By Jan Ross
How can the land of victories and optimism come to terms with a life after the imperial moment?
Learning to decline – is it doable? Can a world power that no longer presumes to dominate the world find a new role, without depression or biting fear, is there life after the imperial moment? That is the question that the United States faces and that will define the term of the next American President starting 20 January 2009. Managing getting weaker, revising the political self-image, if not the national identity is at least as great a challenge as tangible dangers; from the results of the financial crisis to competition from Russia and China to terrorism. Anyone who heard Barack Obama and John McCain at the end of the last week during their first debate had to have had doubts as to whether they (and their country) have clearly made out the entire dimension of the fall of America or whether they have found the courage to speak the truth.
It feels like a mocking punishment of the Gods that George W. Bush, the onetime embodiment of American Hubris, has to preside over the economic humiliation of his nation after the political and moral crises that had already openly broken out. America is simultaneously paying the price of power and powerlessness. The global image of the United States has not recovered since the days of the dominance rush, when the Bush government made its land hated in the world with the Iraq War and the excesses of Abu Ghraib. At the same time, however, the superior power position against which the anti-American resentment is still pointed, has long begun to crumble.
In 2005 President Bush Still Felt Himself to Be at the Peak of Power
The economic and political dynamic has shifted to Asia at the outset of the 21st century – a secular process that has only entered the world consciousness with true drama in the last three of four years. A resurgent Russia can militarily force Georgia, the US client, to its knees without penalty. The fall of Saddam Hussein did not bring the democratic transformation of the Islamic world, but instead the end of the American era in the Middle East – from the Iranian atomic danger to the oil production quotas of Saudi Arabia to the power games of Pakistani domestic politics – control has slipped away from Washington.
This is all happening with breathtaking speed. Even in January 2005, at the beginning of his second term, George W. Bush announced perhaps the most ambitious historic program that has ever been proclaimed by a modern democratic statesman: The spread of the “fire of freedom” that, like a prairie fire, would grip the far corners of the world. It is difficult to imagine that Bush’s successor, whether Democrat or Republican, will again act and speak in this manner.
Even the American people have not overlooked that something sinister is afoot; the country is reacting with an uncertainty that runs deeper than the political dissatisfaction with an extremely unpopular President. Even before the credit crisis, the motherland of capitalism was being eaten at by doubts about capitalism, by the fear of cheap imports from Asia or by the consequences of free trade with Mexico. The collapse of Wall Street is therefore also such a significant event because it has hit a people for whom the trusted values of performance, justice and the reward of hard work have come into question.
Part 2
The oil dependency of the nation of automobile drivers USA is no longer of interest to only the ecological cranks as a shameful and harmful addiction – but is now seen as a national security risk of the first degree because it places the West at the mercy of Petro Regimes such as Caracas, Riyadh and Moscow. The failure of Bush’s war course has shaken the trust the citizens had not only in American power, but also in the American mission that the country had something undeniably good to offer with world. Fundamentally speaking, it still sounds too weak when Barack Obama offers the slogan “change” as the solution for the fight for political renewal. What the United States now seeks and needs is healing.
Preachers of calm, who fight against the downfall thesis, point to earlier periods of American weakness, that soon thereafter were over with: At the end of the 1980s, the future seemed to belong to Japan, and during the Cold War there were even experts that gave the destitute and strictly disciplined Soviet Union better chances of winning and surviving than the opulent and softened down United States.
But it isn’t always all as it once was – today’s American loss of power it is not. The Communist eastern bloc was in truth only capable of competing militarily and hopefully inferior in all other areas, as was immediately shown after 1989 during the complete industrial collapse from East Berlin to Vladivostok. And Japan is a small country handicapped as the historic aggressor in the Second World War when compared to self-confident giants like China or India. The entire history of the United States to date was the story of its rise to the pinnacle of a world dominated by the West; but exactly this world, however, is no longer self-evident.
It is not even necessary to have a replacement through stronger powers or blocs in order to bring American exceptionalism into question. The competitors for the top global position have, in fact, glaring weaknesses: China can fall into a political crisis through social and ecological upheavals; Europe lacks the strategic ability to act and the appetite for greatness. The USA will remain the strongest and most important state for the foreseeable future.
But that changes nothing about the fact that wealth, influence and strength are shifting to the south and east. That lies in the incredible success of the original American model of the middle class dream of prosperity and personal freedom. Almost everyone in the world wants to live that way and hundreds of millions have made it. They are competing economically with the United States with ever cheaper but already intelligent workforces. They are simultaneously putting the USA under pressure politically and reducing its sphere of influence: Because the citizens of Istanbul, Bombay or Kuala Lumpur no longer want to be post-colonially commanded around from Washington or anywhere else in the West. It is the Americanization of the world through a masses invented in America – individualism and the globalization that goes forth from America, that tears more at the superiority of the United States than any ideological or power politics opposition.
Part 3: The eternal good mood is becoming a handicap
Learning to decline – that must be especially difficult for the USA. This is a nation of winners. Its collective memory has no recollection of the ravages of war in the home country. The Americans have experienced the history of modern times and capitalism to this point as the story of their own success. Spaniards, Portuguese and Brits have learned to deal with the loss of their colonial wealth, with being second-class; the Americans are behind in experience – with the imperial period still ahead.
In an often uplifting, sometimes annoying way the spiritual life of the nation is set to optimism from a school education in which one is constantly praised to the indestructible belief in scientific-technological progress. It is this mentality that made the United States great. It is also this mentality that will now be a problem because it opposes the self-doubt, humility and the peaceful process of growing historically old: The USA is by definition the “new world”, how should it accustom itself to others being the young and fresh? We don’t know whether the Americans, who to now have almost always been winners, whether they will be good or bad losers.
It may be that the USA will desperately cling to the idea of its exceptionalism and the remains of its fleeting excess of power. Despite his impressive personal stature, the candidate John McCain now seems to be the impression of a backwards looking defiance, like the figure of home sickness after an irretrievable past epoch of American “leadership” in the free world.
Barack Obama by comparison could, with all the uncertainties, become the first American President of a “post-American era.” That too, the way out of the provincial ego-centrism of power, would be a distinctly American possibility of an already internal “international”, that is an ethnically, religiously and culturally pluralistic society. The land of immigration USA, the only universal nation, can win a different relationship to the world than that of dominance: It can mirror and represent it, play out and mediate its differences. Perhaps America will take the first step in that direction on November 4.
(Hattip: Clarsonimus)
Source: Medienkritik
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