America the weary?

The United States of America is the world’s superpower.  At the moment, though, because of the current stalemate over the Federal budget and the national debt ceiling, we are not behaving like a superpower.

Have Americans become tired of being a superpower?  Are we ambivalent about that status, and so just letting it slip away?

Superpower status must first be earned, as the United States had done by the end of World War II.  And it also must be periodically renewed—like a driver’s license—because the status brings with it the obligation of responsibilities, and the rest of the world expects the superpower to live up to those responsibilities.  As with a driver’s license, failure to fulfill the obligations implies a risk that the status is lost or revoked.

And, too, after years of driving some people opt out of the program.  The hassle of the obligations either becomes too demanding, or it just doesn’t fit in with the preferred lifestyle.  The same might be said of Americans’ interest to continue being a superpower.

Are Americans now thinking of opting out of the superpower program?  Or, are we already in the process of losing that status? 

Given the interconnected nature of today’s world—the huge amounts of easy international travel, the importance of cross-border commerce and business relationships—certain changes in America’s relations with the global community could suggest answers to these questions.  One change would be reductions in our opportunities and/or abilities to economically compete for foreign business and influence; the other, a diminishing desire on our part to reach outside the national borders for constructive engagement with the outside world.

Both changes are already taking place.

We don't always make it easy for foreigners to like us

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a significant slippage of the respect in which the overall world community holds the United States.  Much  of the world feels that we have tarnished our national image with three events:  an overly-long and chaotic armed conflict in Afghanistan; an unethical and poorly thought-out military expedition into Iraq; and, finally, promoting and imposing on others an economic system that contains the root causes and triggers for the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.  In those events, the feelings are that we showed poor national discipline in a variety of ways—Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, pooled mortgage-backed securities and derivatives; the names alone are explanatory—and, in general, conducted ourselves in ways that caused far too much harm to others.

Taken together, these events have lessened the desire of the developing nations of the world to avail themselves of the goods, services and ideas that we have to offer.  When others don’t want us in their marketplaces we cannot compete for their business and their hearts and minds.

That’s Exhibit A.  It’s bad enough by itself.

We make ourselves look inept at governing

Exhibit B might be worse.  Now, by way of our polarized and almost frozen political process, it looks to the outside world like we cannot even put together the fiscal mechanisms to run our Federal government, to the point of closing our national parks and turning away foreign visitors.  To add injury to insult, our politics have raised the specter of government default on its monetary obligations—many of which are due to foreign individuals and other nations.

There should be no surprise if this causes people in the rest of the world to think that America is failing to act as a responsible superpower.  Nor should we be surprised if others begin to feel that Americans prefer the self-indulgence of existing separate and apart from the rest of the world.

We have created an internal political environment in which America’s president has had to cancel plans to attend an Asia-Pacific leadership summit. The politics of this development are of importance only to Americans.  What is important to the Asia-Pacific nations is the loss of dialog and engagement as a result of the missing president.  This leaves a participatory vacuum, which the Chinese leadership is happy to fill.  China’s gain, America’s loss.

Perhaps Americans have grown weary of global leadership.  Many say that we should no longer be the “global policeman.”  But without America in that role it would leave a hole—another vacuum—in the world order.  As always, vacuum will suck something in to fill itself.  Before relinquishing this role, we need to ask ourselves:  “What would the world look like with some other nation as the global policeman?”

Foreign policy cannot be just about us

We tell the rest of the world that we might not pay what we already owe to others, some of whom are them, not us; that causes trust issues.  We have a domestic political environment that seems to preclude an official national leadership presence at significant international events; that causes concerns about how much importance we place in working with other nations.

We are beginning to show an apparent willful national intent to start a process of reducing American engagement with the rest of the world community.

If this continues, it is likely that a diminished American leadership presence would soon give way to the leadership of another nation.  It’s hard to see how a United States of America that would allow this to happen could continue to hold on to its superpower status for long.

Not attending one particular international leadership gathering does not by itself set a trend for the future.  Disputing an individual year’s Federal budget is not, of itself, convincing evidence that our national political system is no longer able to extend its view outside our national borders.

What will cause these events to become alarming is when most of the American public scoffs at them and dismisses them as the product of some kind of near-term dysfunction in our governmental system.  Despite any truth in that conclusion, the hidden danger is that it avoids confronting the global implications inherent in understanding—or not understanding--the responsibilities that we have as a superpower.  If we don’t accept the obligations of those responsibilities, we begin to opt out of being a superpower.

Something that we can do -- if we choose to

If America wants to remain a superpower, then we must realize that we need to renew that status with the global community.  That can be done only if we care enough to show other peoples that we are worthy—as they define that concept—to compete in their marketplaces, and if our internal politics support visible and participatory American leadership.

This can be done if we adopt a national awareness that our failures of the first decade of the century have left a legacy of unhealed harm to others.  We must develop and implement overt and visible healing actions that others regard as sincere and valuable, and be convincing about it through consistent diplomatic outreach.  That awareness and those actions must be combined with a national policy to aggressively pursue opportunities for constructive international engagement.  Our political process must recognize that such engagement deserves the highest national priority.

The only alternative is to withdraw behind our borders, avoiding the obligations of superpower responsibilities, and wait for our superpower status to be revoked.