I love reading Kenneth Anderson especially when he compares both France and America and makes some thought-provoking points about Obama and the views of his administration on American and and American power. Sugary excerpt :
The question is whether President Obama is genuinely signaling a new
paradigm. Multilateralism as a signal of the Tired Superpower that
wants to refocus inwards and let the rest of the world deal with its
own problems? Or what every first term American president always does
– try to focus on the domestic issues that got him elected? One can’t
say with certainty at this point – what the President would like to do
is clear; not clear whether political events will let him.
Nuclear weapon in Iran? We’ll sing kumbayah at the Security Council
and be presented with the remarkable spectacle of an openly incredulous
French president reminding an American president that, tacitly, that as
he speaks the Iranians knit together the pieces of their nuclear
weapons. It’s
quite an exchange,
and not one that initially even penetrated the warm syrup of the NYT or
other American mainstream media, presumably because it didn’t fit many
existing narratives, about the United States, about France, about many
things.
But at the same time, American conservatives wonder why on earth, if
there were no Israel to worry about, they should worry overmuch about a
nuclear Iran aimed at Europe, when the Europeans have themselves been
so relaxed about it. If, in an alternate universe, the Middle East
contained no Israel and never had, would America have much reason to
care about nukes pointed at Europe? When the Europeans have themselves
been so unconcerned about it? Not our world, of course, and we do
worry correctly about both Tel Aviv and Paris, but that’s because –
let’s be clear – we’re not multilateralists in things that truly count.
But then, what I have always admired about every senior intellectual
I’ve known in France is that they are not multilateralists, either, not
truly, and whether of left or right, whether they want to be or not,
they are pour la France, Gaullists down to their toenails.
If you doubt it for a moment, watch closely the two YouTube videos of
Sarkozy and
Royal singing La Marsillease [Marseillaise] the night Sarkozy won. They both
mean
it, more so, I’m afraid, than Obama, husband or wife, or any of my
academic friends in the administration, for whom something as
embarrassing as the national anthem is to be strictly limited to ball
games, and God forbid anyone be preserved on a FB photo putting a hand
over one’s heart. It’s Gaullist because it is finally not about
justice or morality or any of the stuff that tends to move Americans
and which, to be sure, moves me – it’s about honor. They’re not finally
multilateralists, either, not when it comes to “France-of-Caverns,” to
cite Rene Char: and therefore let us be more French.
The United States has done the inward-turning before, and notably
following military defeat, in the post-Vietnam 1970s. It appears, at
this juncture, that the United States is moving to accept “soft” defeat
– finally do what James Fallows, for example, has always wanted to do,
simply declare victory and come home – both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Enable the Obama administration to focus on achieving two fond dreams
at once – domestic social democracy and, by reason of the domestic cost
of that burden, ensure that the United States cannot play the role of
ultimate security guarantor in the world over the longer term.
