America Changes Hats

Ben Wildsmith

At the time of writing, the precarious ceasefire between the USA and Iran is holding, even as Israel bombards Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz is, once again, restricted.

Donald Trump’s belief in the ‘madman strategy’ he outlined in his book on negotiation precludes anybody from predicting what comes next – if we had a clue, then he’d see it as a failure of process.

I’m writing this from the west coast of India, with the imperilled Gulf states over the water and necessary LPG gas in short supply. You’re likely dreading a trip to the petrol station.

Iranians don’t know what to fear next: more incoming missiles or the wrath of their own government.

Citizens of Lebanon, yet again, are expected to accept that their deaths might be deemed a necessary by-product of Israel’s action against Hezbollah.

Their own national military cannot save them, largely because sanctions imposed on their country has defanged it.

The globalised anxiety of this situation touches us all in different ways. Traditional alliances and loyalties have been stretched beyond their elasticity as they require us to accept unthinkable human tragedies as the price of them.

For anyone with the capacity to project the lessons of Iraq into the future, any talk of ‘victory’ in this context seems myopic and dishonest.

Chaos begets chaos, cruelty gives birth to cruelty, and intransigence makes fools of us all. Nobody on any side of this multifaceted disaster is going to put up their hands and agree that they are the bad guys.

That’s for the movies.

The movies have a lot to answer for. When America’s moral authority as the leader of the ‘free world’ lay in tatters after the Vietnam war, it turned to Hollywood, in the shape of Ronald Reagan, to reimagine its virtues through the moral certainties of its fictional self.

Instead of the horrors of Mai Lai, the obscenity of ‘defoliation’ with napalm, or its eventual humiliating retreat, he painted a ‘shining city on the hill’ to which the world’s population could aspire.

Under the symbolic white hat of cowboy rectitude, the pursuit of global power and domestic wealth continued with the connivance of Europe and the Anglosphere.

Reagan’s pre-election deal to scupper then President Carter’s attempts to free American hostages in Iran was brushed off by the world, as was his sale of weapons to the Islamic regime after assuming office.

No hard evidence to the contrary seemed to penetrate the myth of American beneficence. Its cultural projection has been so successful that it’s routine to hear people in the UK refer to America in the world as ‘us’. The conflation of its interests with ours has remained largely unchallenged until now.

Plausible

President Trump’s failure to tell a story of America that is plausible to anybody outside of his core supporters will be his, and potentially America’s, undoing.

The willingness of people around the world to disengage from American aggression has depended upon a general assumption that it is restrained by founding principles with which most of us agree.

Trump’s readiness to wear the black hat in the cowboy flick, to characterise American influence as deriving from nothing more than military technology and economic advantage, has changed how the world perceives it.

Trump’s threats to Europe and Canada, whilst purring at Russia, invites us all to imagine a radically different future that includes previously unthinkable possibilities.

Chinese restrictions on liberty, traditionally viewed as anathema to western values, begin to fade in our collective anxiety as American leadership careers into random acts of sudden malice that seem to arrive from nowhere.

‘China’s role in negotiating…’ seems to crop up ever more frequently when we nervously check our phones in the hope that the world has been dragged back from the brink. That Chinese statecraft could begin to look like a stabilising factor in world affairs, only 50 years on from the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, is a damning measure of how quickly America’s reputation is plummeting under its current leadership.

The American flag has also, of course, served as a moral blanket under which Israel has operated for decades.

Aside from the vast sums of money and provision of military equipment that America has provided to it, Israel has acted as a forward base for the American project in the region which is most distrustful of that project’s intentions.

Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, it has undergone a similar perceptual transformation as that affecting America now.

Where once its core mission was seen as one of sanctuary, it is now increasingly viewed as a belligerent.

Territorial expansion

Each new outbreak of hostilities requires us to accept Israeli territorial expansion, whether into the West Bank, Syria, or Lebanon.

Netanyahu holds up his hands protesting self-defence as, time and again, we watch bombs dropped on negotiators and borders shifting outwards.

The symbiotic relationship between Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel is losing support for each in a world that suspects neither is being governed in their own interests, let alone for the wider good.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of the world has uneasily accepted, or at least tolerated, the moral authority of the USA and its proxies, of which the UK is one.

With Europe and the Anglosphere now shocked into horrified silence and inaction, it is acting with the nihilism of a power that has lost the sense of its own destiny.

If the world concludes that its safety depends on a multipolar division of global responsibilities, it will be because America failed to imagine itself beyond the banalities of old movies.

As other powers have risen, it has abdicated from besting them in favour of trying to repel with threats. Instead of writing a script for the new century, it is content to change hats in a worn-out plot.