America: you’ll miss it when it’s gone

3 March 2007

The American presidential election campaign is about to get serious, and sooner than usual, since about half of all the delegates to the nominating conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties will have been chosen less than a year from now. In the absence of the emergence of some dark horse, the Democrats will either nominate Hillary Clinton (the Rodham will be dropped for the duration of the campaign), a candidate of the centre-Left; the very-Left Barack Obama, his emollience and what passes for charisma these days concealing his 100 per cent liberal voting record and uncertain grasp of the issues; or the hard-Left John Edwards, a smiley version of shrieky Howard Dean. The Republicans will counter with John McCain, a hero intensely focused on defending America from Muslim jihadists, the Kremlin and a militarising China; or Mitt Romney, who is having some success wooing the Christian Right despite his Mormon religion, which many Christians consider a cult; or perhaps Rudy Giuliani, who aims to overcome the pro-abortion, anti-gun positions and urban lifestyle so unacceptable to the Christian Right by promising to appoint conservative judges.

All are internationalists. But the circumstances in which they will be campaigning to succeed George W. Bush might well drive them towards a form of neo-isolationism that will be as pleasing to the jihadists as it will be to the Yankee-go-home crowds that are urging both Gordon Brown and David Cameron to distance themselves from the United States.

By the time the two parties pick their candidates, Iraq will have been settled one way or the other. Either order will have been restored by the new ‘surge’, and more responsibility turned over to the Iraqis, or American troops will have failed in that mission, and been ‘redeployed’ to safe bases from which to witness the sectarian slaughter. Either way, American lives will no longer be directly at risk, as defence secretary Bob Gates promised just a few weeks ago. And either way, Americans will want no more of foreign adventures, at least for many years.

Americans were calm in the face of Vladimir Putin’s recent reintroduction of the language of the Cold War, and even — if truth be told — somewhat amused. Suddenly, France and Germany had a bout of remembrance of cold wars past, and began to wonder if Yankee-go-home is the optimal policy. But no presidential candidate will dare ask voters who know that the French and Germans, not to mention the Spaniards and Italians, abandoned America in Iraq, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those countries if Russia decides to deploy its oil and gas weapons to bring European policies more closely in line with its wishes. Policy types with whom I have spoken say that if Europe is truly worried about Putin’s decision to hammer his shoe on their conference table in Munich, they should spend more on defence, as we Americans will be doing to shore up our ability to cope with terrorism.

There is an inclination to have our country see to its own interests, and let the rest of the world inherit the whirlwind that is the consequence of the anti-Americanism so rampant during the Bush years. Enough Americans to make politicians take notice are humming a new national tune, Milton Kellem’s ‘Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now’, made famous in 1956 by, of all groups, Patience and Prudence.