More Americans don’t care of America falls from power

It seems that isolationism is becoming trendy again. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations, an isolationist streak is emerging from Americans that the nation has not experience since the Cold War.

For example, the number of Americans that believe that the US should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own” jumped from 30% in 2001 to 42% now.

Perhaps most striking for me is that these numbers are even higher for Democrats and independents. A 55% majority of Democrats believe that we should mind our own business (up from 40% in 2001) and for independents, the number went from 27% to 42%.

The study also showed that over a third of all Americans (35%) said it would be just fine with them if a second superpower were to emerge to challenge U.S. leadership.

Americans have always been pulled by the two competing forces of isolationism and internationalism. The great American heritage of standing as a “city upon a hill” that later became the moral justification for Western expansion and intervention in Latin America often bumped up against Washington’s famous warnings not to become entangled with Europe’s problems. That all changed of course, with WWI and WWII, conflicts which left the United States with the almost universally accepted title of “leader of the free world.” Of course, critics exist and this is not to suggest that we ever truly lived up to our expectations, as Garry Wills points out in his Foreign Affairs article, Bully of the Free World.

Anyone who has ever read the inaugural address of Kennedy and Clinton, as well as Reagan and Bush, know that the belief in American exceptionalism remains firmly planted in our collective consciousness. This began to wane after the debacle that was Vietnam, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, traditional conservatives of the Pat Buchanan ilk made isolationism a relatively popular belief for a while. The 9/11 attacks silenced those voices for a time, resulting in surging interest in foreign policy for the first time in years.

Now, with our reputation at the lowest point perhaps ever, and the conflict in Iraq looking increasingly grim, the Pew survey confirms that people are less interested in America doing the business of leading in the world.

Suffice to say, I am NOT one of the 42% who believe that the US should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” I believe that such a philosophy is not only tremendously shortsighted, but dangerous.

Of course in many ways there is nothing that Americans can do about the change of status. A 2005 National Intelligence Council report titled “Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project” (available on the CIA's Web site) suggested that the era of American dominance could be coming to an end sooner than most people realize. Furthermore, according to the NIC, “America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend.”

This is NOT something Americans should welcome. As Fred Kaplan of Slate points out, this shift to a multipolar world “will not be painless,” but will involve “not merely a recalibration in the balance of world power, but also—as these things do—a loss of wealth, income, and, in every sense of the word, security.”

Americans who simply want to close their eyes and facilitate these new trends do so at their peril. This country already suffers from massive trade deficits and outsourcing of jobs to more lucrative areas overseas, and one of the only reasons China does not reevaluate the value of the dollar (given how much of American debt it owns) that doing so would disrupt the global economic market. Our education system is barely even competitive any more compared to other countries and we are producing far fewer skilled workers than many other industrialized countries. In short, things seems to be going downhill.

But wait, you might ask. Wouldn’t America minding its own business improve our image in the world and thus prolong our dominance? The answer to this is no, although it is without question that the arrogance and incompetence of our current administration has certainly accelerated our downfall. The reality is that the more we retreat from international obligations, the more likely others will rush in to fill the void. We have already seen a reluctant China take on increasing importance in the North Korean problem. Ditto with Europe and Iran. This is only the beginning.

As Deepak Lal argues in his controversial book, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order, “After nearly two centuries of relative economic decline,” China and India “are at last rising from their slumber. On their present course, they may match US economic and possibly military prowess by the end of this century. If the United States is unwilling to shoulder the imperial burden of maintaining a global Pax, one of these emerging imperial giants may do so in the future.” But does anyone honestly believe that a world under Chinese or Indian dominance will be more just, more humane, and more stable than a world under American dominance. Thought a large degree of ethnocentrism clouds my response, I certainly do not.

Given the terrible debacle of Iraq and our numerous misdeeds in the international community, it is tempting for Americans to simply sit back and let someone else “make the world safe for democracy” (although I am not sure why, since they have not even been asked to pay for the conflicts they so hardily supported at the time). As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration recently noted, "Isolated by the nationalistic unilateralism of the neoconservatives who control the Bush administration, the US can expect no sympathy or help from former allies and rising new powers." This may be trie, but welcoming our decline is shortsighted. If Americans believe that values such as freedom and democracy should matter at all, even if they are only given lip service, that weapons proliferation should be a concern of the international community, and the welfare state should survive despite competition from countries without labor laws, the United States must lead the way. Although the fall of our hegemony is perhaps inevitable, as it always is with world powers, it is a part of American tradition that if we are to go down, we will go down fighting.