With people like Newt Gingrich announcing the beginning of World War III, the current conflict in the Middle East deserves at least some comment.
Let us for a moment concede that World War III is real. None the less, the interpretation of the conflict that America’s Republicans advance is all backwards and upside down.
What we are seeing is not the “Islamo-Fascists” against the “Free World.” These terms themselves are devoid of content; the vocabulary is purely persuasive rather than descriptive.
Fascists evil. Terror bad. Islamists wrong.
Freedom good. War necessary. America great.
Ya, ya, we all get it already.
The forces arrayed against the United States Government certainly do reject the “U.S. model,” but this rejection has very little to do with rejecting the values that supposedly define us. For some time now, our politicians have paid lip service to the values of market capitalism and representative democracy while increasing the role of the state both at home and abroad in allocating resources and directing economic activity. The state does these things poorly, and as a result, most of the world has stayed poor.
U.S. policy both assumes and attempts to create stable and sovereign states with fixed borders and the capacity to control their territory. These states are viewed as the only legitimate intermediaries between the populations they represent, the only legitimate conduits for goods and services, the eyes, ears, and voices of the people. This view has been bypassed by reality. The world is increasingly integrated and interdependent despite the best efforts of nationalists everywhere to maintain the provincial system that they inherited.
The statist/nationalist bent that infects the U.S. policy community is incompatible with true freedom because it implies that there is a legitimate role for the state in restricting the flow of goods, people, and ideas. The state as we know it is conservative and repressive by definition. Its employs violence and coercion as it sees fit, and maintains itself as sovereign to the exclusion of other goals.
U.S. policy is schizophrenic because it claims to want both strong states and individual rights. The tension between these goals is evident in the history of our policy toward the developing world.
We have toppled stable sovereign states because they were not sufficiently free, yet for decades we refused to approve of freedom-augmenting reforms across the developing world because they might have upset the highly profitable status-quo.
This is a vulnerable and hypocritical position. The problem as I see it is not that the “U.S. model” is under siege. In fact, our foreign and domestic policy demand immediate reform. Rather, the problem is that the opposition so far has come from the wrong direction.
The most serious and dedicated critics of U.S. policy in the modern world believe that the problem with the U.S. model is not that it advocates structures that are inimical to human freedom. Rather, they criticize it on the grounds that it does not permit the sort of centralized command and control they deem necessary to overcome poverty and resist foreign influence. They see the strengthening of the nation state, the augmentation of its ability to coerce its citizens and mediate their interaction with the outside world, as the objective of their resistance to the U.S.
The hyper-nationalists have dominated the world stage in part because their tactics and rhetoric are hyper-dramatic (martial parades, fiery speeches, and shiny new government programs). Unfortunately for the vast majority of humankind, the humanists of the world have been asleep at the wheel, unwilling since the 1960’s to say anything truly radical and unable to frame their objections in terms that capture the imagination of the silent majority. Unless we humanists wake up and make ourselves heard, the nationalists may succeed in carving up the globe once again.
This all too seductive path is one of ignorance, war, and decline. The current international order is dysfunctional and will be reformed or replaced one way or another, but we must decide now if we will push forward with the integration of the world or fall back into the comfortable and deadly provincialism that dominated for some many millennia. This is the next World War, and we are losing it already.
