Framing an understanding of America's role in the world today

by Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Society Issues Analyst
[3-29-03]

Gene TeSelle would welcome comments about this essay, which he has prepared for the next issue of Witherspoon Society's Network News.
Please send a note with your thoughts.
 

Richard John Neuhaus wrote, back in 1985, "On the balance and considering the alternatives, the influence of the United States is a force for good in the world."

Neuhaus may be, "on balance," right. We can all think of ways the U.S. has been a force for good, a model of democratic institutions and civil rights and legal due process, a source of food and economic aid, a rescuer when there is natural disaster or war. It would be nice to puff out our chests and pull ourselves up high in a fit of patriotism.

But it's that "on balance" that bothers me. The balance can tip at just a little over 50%. Even something healthy may have cancer on the inside or be a "Typhoid Mary" spreading disease to others. When you begin to think about it, you see more and more ways the U.S. is not a "force for good in the world."

Recent debates around the military buildup to attack Iraq have brought a number of ironies to light.

The record of the U.S. is mixed at best when it comes to supporting human rights and democratic institutions. In our own hemisphere we cannot help but be aware of U.S. sponsorship or approval of coups in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, where democratically elected governments were replaced with military dictatorships supported by the U.S. and whose human rights violations are still being covered up with the aid of the U.S. government. Expressions of concern for atrocities in countries like Iraq and North Korea look hypocritical in light of the see-no-evil approach toward other countries.

By approving NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, Congress and the Clinton-Gore administration effected a massive transfer of sovereignty away from the U.S. government, away from states and localities, to shadowy tribunals where corporations can sue for monetary damages if regulations make it more expensive for them to do business. The next stage that the "Washington consensus" has in mind for the world is to do away with all national restrictions on investment (and thus economic control) from abroad; to open up all services, public and private, to international competition; and even to privatize and commodify essential things like water, on the principle that as it becomes scarcer it will be a good "profit center."

Globalization has made the world not safer but more dangerous, doing away with traditional safeguards, putting steadily more economic pressure on everyone from hourly workers to middle managers, and making ordinary people compete with powerful corporations.

When we Americans make claims about our constructive role in the world, we have a responsibility to ask how well-founded those claims are, and even more than that, a responsibility to ask how our role in the world can be improved. We in the U.S. have often operated with a kind of "exceptionalism," asserting that we are "different" from other countries and thus are exempt from the pride and delusion that seem to be displayed so obviously in them.

True patriotism is not blind loyalty to a self-proclaimed leader, nor to an ideology. It is the readiness to examine our assumptions, our behavior, and the consequences of both, then to propose course corrections that will keep our nation faithful to the best in its heritage. Those corrections may be much more demanding than we expect, but if we refuse to consider them we will be turning our backs on all that is good - even great - in that heritage.