Opinion America the insecure

Or do they? Americans have an exalted sense of their nation and its liberating mission. That self-image stops making sense if the US is not engaged. The authoritative 2010 survey of American public opinion by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that more than 8 out of 10 Americans think it’s either “very desirable” or “somewhat desirable” for the US to “exert strong leadership in world affairs.”

In the real world that means doing foreign policy. I see Americans torn. There’s a quasi-isolationist urge. They’re tired of wars. They want jobs. They see problems piling up on the home front that they want fixed ahead of foreign adventures. Something rankles when they hear talk of American decline and the end of the American century and China rising. They want a president to stand tall for American greatness if only to anaesthetise them against hardship.

Republican wannabes sense this. To judge by the 2012 campaign,they think foreign policy might matter after all. They’re trying to cast Barack Obama as a president who has sold America short,an impostor who has ditched the mystical belief in the unique calling of the US that is American exceptionalism. So Mitt Romney says Obama takes his values not from the small towns of America but from “the capitals of Europe.” He’s offering “European answers to American problems.” He’s projecting a weak US: “We’re following the French into Libya.” The president is a naïve idealist undermined by his “questioning as to whether America is an exceptional nation.”

Newt Gingrich has decrypted in Obama a “Kenyan,anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich wants a “foreign policy that is clear about the evil that we face” — that would be Shariah law among other things — and rooted in this universalist message: “America is still the last,best hope of mankind on Earth.”

I have several reactions to this that all fit under the rubric: baloney! First,we’re not in 1990: America remains dominant but can’t resolve problems alone and will in the next decade,by some estimates,see China overtake it as the world’s largest economy.

Second,it’s precisely Republican factionalism in Washington that’s stopping the US from attaining again the greatness Republicans invoke. It leaves critical challenges unmet,stops investment in education and research,and leaves America trailing China on the green technologies that will be big job-creators in coming decades.

Third,it’s just delusional to imagine that any president,confronted by the meltdown of 2008,would not have seen as a core task a retrenchment of US overseas commitments to bring them in line with diminished resources.

But with an angry,anxious nation,Republicans are betting that invocations of greatness and dominance,however illusory,will resonate. Bruce Jentleson,a political scientist at Duke University,said,“After the killing of Osama bin Laden,they can’t attack Obama as a wimp,but they will attack him as not being a real American.” Obama,he added,must answer by demonstrating “what this generation of Americans is going to show the world,how it’s going to compete in a global era. Against the illusion of restoration,he must offer adaptation.”

With the US economy wobbling,Obama runs the Bush Sr risk. He got bin Laden and has been on the right side of the Arab Spring — what Timothy Garton Ash has called “the most hopeful set of events in the 21st century so far,comparable in scale and potential to 1989.” Americans respond to that kind of hope. They care about foreign policy and see through foreign posturing. What they need now from Obama is a better sense of how their economy can thrive in this changed world. Roger Cohen