The New Frontiers
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville took his much-ballyhooed tour of America, wandering the country and marveling at the egalitarianism that paled in comparison with the strict class structure of his native France. The United States was on the edge of the world, pushing against the frontier, with soil for all to till, truly an example of the pastoral idyll. Americans liked it that way, and some were concerned about how our nation would develop, whether it would remain the agrarian republic that Jefferson envisioned or morph into a European-style imperial power. Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, was working on his magnum opus at the time, a fivepart series of paintings titled, “The Course of Empire,” which expressed beautifully these worries.
The first work is called “The Savage State,” depicting at the break of dawn a rugged wilderness populated by people who look like Native Americans. The second, known as “The Arcadian or Pastoral State,” shows plowed fields tended to by the salt of the earth, a picture straight out of Greece’s Dorian Age. The third, “The Consummation of Empire,” is set at high noon and recalls the pomp and splendor of Rome at its apogee. The fourth is “Destruction,” where the city of the previous scene is sacked during afternoon by invaders, conjuring up the Visigoths and Huns. The fifth and last is “Desolation”; the once-bustling metropolis lies deserted and crumbling as dusk descends.
Many scholars have used Cole’s masterpiece as a visual aid for their theories about the decline of America, challenging the fatuous notion of exceptionalism with the stark reality of civilization: that, after a century of wars and police actions, our day in the Sun will eventually end, just as it has for every power that has come before us. They posit we are in the phase between “The Consummation of Empire” and “Desolation,” and that there’s no going back. I’m more optimistic; we are at that point, but we can change course, if we’re willing to recognize the faults of our foreign policy and are open to sweeping changes in our defense posture.
Right now, we have troops stationed in 148 countries across the globe and at 662 bases in 38 different nations. Our global presence is very much similar to the footprint that the British used to have before the decolonization of the post-war era, with several important caveats.
Our Anglo-Saxon friends practiced a more transparent form of imperialism, actually taking over places, subjecting the inhabitants to direct rule, and exploiting natural resources for hungry manufacturers and consumers in the United Kingdom. The United States’ means of control are more insidious. The CIA has toppled unfriendly regimes in Iran and Indonesia, Nicaragua and Guatemala, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the list goes on and on.
This political clout lays the groundwork for economic domination. And that’s not to say that empire is always bad. India benefited greatly from British rule, prospering from the elimination of backward cultural practices such as the caste system, sati, and thuggee, the emergence of an educated bureaucracy, the introduction of English, and the construction of a modern infrastructure system. This sort of thing is costly to maintain and, eventually, people get sick of paying through the nose to fund overseas adventures while domestic troubles are mounting.
In the aftermath of World War II, Britain couldn’t afford to maintain its empire. It was awash in debt and its citizens had lost their sense of fight. The few times it did try to resist what Prime Minister Harold MacMillan called “the wind of change,” it was shut out, losing jungle battles in Malaysia and failing dismally to retake the Suez Canal from the Egyptians. Generally, the U.K. bowed out gracefully.
Our situation is similar, though I don’t believe that we will suffer the same loss of status that Britain did. We are, however, spread too thin, slowly ending conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and grappling with a $700 billion defense budget that has sapped domestic programs of needed funding. The obvious result of this is a protest movement like Occupy Wall Street, which one could easily compare to the U.K.’s own Winter of Discontent.
It is clear that the American Empire has to end. Fortunately, that does not necessarily spell our decline. We have to continue to defend our interests around the globe, but we must do so in a cost-effective way, a way that doesn’t draw the ire of the world’s citizens. Moving to a foreign policy model based on soft power is the best solution.
If you have ever opened a diplomatic journal – Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy Magazine are my favorites – you know exactly what I’m talking about. A phrase coined in 1990 by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, soft power means our “ability to attract others by the legitimacy of U.S. policies and the values that underlie them.” In other words, it is peace through respect rather than peace through strength, leadership by collaboration, not coercion.
Soft power has long been a key part of the State Department’s toolkit, from the Marshall Plan to JFK’s Alliance for Progress. But just like how State is overshadowed by Defense, soft power takes a back seat to hard power, i.e. direct military action. When Barack Obama swept into office, he promised a new emphasis on soft power, but he has not gone far enough in re-orienting American foreign policy. Indeed, in an effort to counter the growing influence of China in Southeast Asia, Obama announced plans to open a new military base in Darwin, Australia staffed with 2,500 troops.
Meanwhile, as we put more feet on the ground, China seeks to win the hearts and minds of people in that region and the world over. It has sprinkled billions of dollars around Africa, signing economic cooperation pacts and energy deals with a clutch of leaders. It has bought the goodwill of many in the Pacific Rim with infrastructure projects financed by state-owned corporations.
It has even made inroads in the West, setting up Confucius Institutes to spread its propaganda and launching a charm offensive that has touched everything from the billboards atop Times Square to many of our country’s movie theaters and sports arenas. You might think this would prompt Congress to pump up the budget for international assistance, but you would be wrong. In fact, 165 House Republicans recently penned a letter urging the total defunding of the agency, USAID, responsible for aid. That might be politically wise, it is, however, a geopolitical blunder.
As noted analysts like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia’s Earth Institute have observed, it would cost chump change for the United States to drastically reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria in Africa and to fund family-planning services there. In the Middle East, we would do well to modernize our media outreach to regular folks through our external news agency, The Voice of America, which suffers for both a lack of money and a long history of mismanagement. In Southeast Asia, we could plow funds into efforts for regional cooperation, like the Mekong River Committee.
Of course, these are just a few examples of policies we should look into. They are certainly cheaper than the oversized military we have today and, if anything, entail a lower risk of the “Desolation” and “Destruction” that Cole so ominously foretold.
After reading the correspondence in reference to my previous column, I have to say that I take umbrage at the way Dr. Harold Paez has characterized me and the Occupy Movement. The people in Zuccotti Park, well, who were in Zuccotti Park and still hold various public squares across the nation, are not seeking the overthrow of American society. They are, to borrow a line from George H.W. Bush, fighting for a kinder, gentler nation. They want to break the stranglehold that corporate money and crony capitalism have put on our democracy and return the government to the people. Their protest is not Crown Heights or Newark or Watts or any other urban riot. Indeed, they’re not the ones causing violence; the police, with their heavyhanded tactics, are responsible for that.
As for Dr. Paez’s criticism of my “tiresome, one-sided ideology,” I will say that I don’t hate Republicans – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette and Nelson Rockefeller were great men. These giants have passed from the scene and look at who and what have replaced them. Today, the Republican Party is corrupted by an incredible cruelty of spirit, which is clearly discernible from Herman Cain’s jokes about an electrified border fence, Ron Paul’s insistence that uninsured people should die if they can’t pay up, Michele Bachmann’s assertion that those who cannot find work should not eat, and Rick Santorum’s praise for suffering. That’s not to excuse the Democratic Party; it is an imperfect vehicle for a liberal policy agenda. Still, as FDR once said, “better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
Lastly, Dr. Paez, I could respond to your wisecracks about detention, but though I am a Stuyvesant senior who doesn’t really appreciate being condescended to, I won’t. Using someone’s youth as a means of discrediting them is a cheap tactic and is the province of the intellectually bankrupt.