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

3 March 2007

The new president, therefore, will be under terrific pressure to devote the nation’s military and security resources to the construction of Fortress America. If European governments can’t finance their own defence, as indigenous Muslim populations turn multiculturalism into a bad joke, and a newly aggressive Russia exerts pressure on EU foreign and domestic policy, well, that’s their problem. They wanted to be rid of American influence, and we are prepared to oblige. They will just have to handle any of those ‘events, dear boy, events’ that Harold Macmillan so feared, and the ‘unknown unknowns’ that the much-maligned Donald Rumsfeld warned about. When those crises burst upon the European and world scenes, frantic calls to the White House are likely to produce ‘Dial 1 if you never defamed the US, otherwise hang up’.

Many anti-Americans with whom I talk are counting on the UN and other multinational agencies to replace the US as the keeper of world order. That assumes that America will continue to be the principal funder of those organisations. The critics of America fail to realise the impact of Hugo Chávez’s televised rants against Bush and America, the UN’s refusal to clean up its act in the aftermath of the oil-for-food scandal, and the organisation’s persistent anti-Semitism. And they don’t seem willing to consider that UN impotence in the face of Iran’s threat to go nuclear is leading America to the conclusion that it had better see to its own defence, and leave it to the Europeans whose capitals are in range of Iran’s missiles to elevate the process of negotiation over the need to get results.

Americans won’t want their new president to withdraw from the UN, but neither will they want him to continue to lavish funds and support on it. Benign neglect will be the preferred policy, with freed-up funds used to help meet the claims of the retiring babyboomers whose refusal to die creates a problem for the nation’s pension system.