By Jeong Lee.
I’ll be up front with you. As much as I aspire one day to become one, I am not a foreign policy maven. In fact, as a schoolteacher, I spend most of my days teaching in the classroom, or grading assignments in the teachers’ office. As someone who is passive and skittish, I seldom voice my opinions in public.
However, recent political and economic woes within the United States have forced me to speak my mind. Heretofore, my blog entries tended to be parochial in scope, focusing mostly on security dilemmas involving the US-ROK alliance and my life as an English teacher in the ROK. It was not until May, 2011, when the United States federal government faced the possibility of a shutdown that I forced myself to reexamine broader issues. I had to rethink with cold disinterestedness the ramifications of the extant unipolar hegemony led by the United States.
In hindsight, I think my soul-searching began in 2008 at the onset of the Great Recession. Up until then, I must admit that I subscribed to the view that the United States—and the Bush Administration—stood for justice, truth, and righteousness. Even when Rumsfeld, Cheney and other neocon policy wonks stridently advocated yet another preemptive war against Iran in 2008, I quietly nodded in approval. After all, so my reasoning went, anyone who challenges America’s status as the de facto “GloboCop” deserves to be punished. In short, I had been a believer and a naïf. What prompted the shift in my beliefs and weltanschauungs was the realization that I duped myself all along into believing that one “chosen” nation which stood “on a hill” could right all the wrongs in this world only if it exercised its God-ordained might.
The truth, I later learned the hard way, is that might does not make right. If nothing else, recent events have taught me that a nation’s dazzling display of its might is bound to run its course.
In search for answers, I embarked on a personal “tutorial” with great historians and journalists. As I savored and devoured voraciously their brilliant, yet at times, flawed treatises, I have reached the following conclusion: That try as they might to deny this incontrovertible fact, all nations are subject to what Reinhold Niebuhr, in his book, The Irony of American History (1952), calls the “vicissitudes of actual history” as both agent and creator. In other words, all nations undergo cycles of rise and fall triggered by external forces, as well as conditions wrought by their own efforts.
In this sense, one could argue that Michael Hirsh’s book, At War With Ourselves (2003), and General Tony Zinni’s book, The Battle for Peace (2006), misread history, for through their callow if not shallow analyses, they seemed to evince interests only in matters pertaining to tactical issues and seemed to hew to the view that America alone is called upon to effect positive changes in this so-called “New World Order.” But one must bear in mind that the two authors’ books merely reflected the rosy, optimistic worldview and zeitgeist then prevalent at America’s perceived zenith.
On the other hand, Amy Chua’s flawed work, Day of Empire, offers somewhat sober analysis on the rise and fall of the so-called “hyper powers.” In it, she dutifully hews to the ancient “dynastic cycle” theory which postulates that empires rise or fall due to the “mandate” from heaven—ie. legitimacy obtained from the people. According to this view, an emperor or a dynasty is stripped of this mandate when he or it undergoes stagnation, or loses his or its ability to govern due to a combination of natural disasters, internecine conflicts, or foreign invasions. In her disjointed narratives, she equates this mandate with the presence of “glue.” That is to say, the ability of an empire or an emperor to tolerate, if not embrace, cultures not its or his own. While Chua adheres to the premise that Pax Americana will continue—for the good of Mankind!—she nonetheless warns her readers that the day America strips itself of its “glue,” it will strip itself of its ideals, raisons d’être, and eventually, its very existence.
However, her “prophecy”—if one can call it as such!—seems irrelevant in light of America’s current woes. For one thing, the present American crisis was not precipitated by the absence of “glue.” In fact, America was and still remains a very tolerant and secular nation. As events unfolded before my eyes from 2008 onwards, it became obvious that America’s penchant for quick fixes, which manifests itself through American propensity to worship military might and America’s wanton profligacy, was to blame for its troubles at home and abroad. Viewed in this light, I believe that the Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich’s 2008 book, The Limits of Power, perhaps offers the best diagnosis for America’s present ills, while Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 book, The Post-American World[1], offers sound advice for what lies ahead. In both cases, their strength lies in their trenchant historical analyses which are rooted in their understanding that America served and continues to serve as “agent” and “creator” of “vicissitudes of actual history” in the making.
Granted, America is and will continue to be a global powerhouse. Recent events have shown that America remains deeply wedded to the world it helped to create in the aftermath of World War II and in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the not so distant future, the United States will be a and not the sole global powerhouse because it has reached its limits as a hyper-power. And unless American citizens stop deluding themselves and see themselves for who they really are, I fear that they will lose their sacrosanct right to freedom, justice, and pursuit of happiness—the very things they treasure most.
For those reasons I decided to speak my mind. Because I subscribe to the view that American citizenry has always been the backbone and the strength of this great nation, and because I believe that the United States still has a role to play in the new world of order of the 2010s and beyond.
