In recent days, I have found myself wishing something that I once could not have imagined. I desire that the President of the United States proves to be a ditherer, a weakling and a fool. I have suddenly realised that if he isn’t, if Barack Obama is better than that, we’re all in a whole heap of trouble.
Let me take you back to May 8, 1947, and to the heat of a packed gymnasium at Delta State Teachers College in Cleveland, Mississippi. President Harry Truman had been due to speak, but a local political spat had led him to withdraw. In his stead spoke Dean Acheson, the Undersecretary of State, already a leading figure in the US foreign policy establishment and set to be one of the giants of American postwar politics.
Acheson wasn’t used to addressing such audiences, but he saw it as a great opportunity. He would, he decided, “sound reveille” and “awaken the American people to the duties of that day of decision”. The day of decision he was referring to was the collapse of Western Europe, reeling from a devastating war. “Human dignity, human freedom” was at stake, he said, and Europe could not recover without the aid of the United States.
Acheson, with Truman’s support, had just launched what, within a month, would become the Marshall Plan, the extraordinary American aid effort to rescue Europe and support capitalist democracy in wartorn nations that were on the verge of starvation and disintegration.
In their triumphant book The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas record the birth of the Marshall Plan and how a small group of American diplomats shaped that country’s policy after the Second World War. What is striking about their account is how close it came to not happening. And by this I don’t so much mean the Marshall Plan (although it is true of that policy, certainly), I mean the entire international outlook of America.
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After the war, America had a choice. It did not need to engage with the world, exert itself to save Europe, confront communism, send troops, pay money. And many (most?) Americans did not want to do so. In the words of one of the wise men, Averell Harriman, “Americans wanted to settle all our difficulties with Russia and then go to the movies and drink Coke”. The decision to engage was down to the drive of the foreign policy elite, to their ability to simplify, over-simplify really, the issues for the American people, and to extraordinary good fortune.
Without Truman as President, American foreign policy would have been very different. If Franklin Roosevelt had died months earlier, Vice-President Henry Wallace — a man who hated the policy that America settled upon — would have been President. And Truman was an unformed mass, who might have acquired a very different shape. When the news came through that FDR had died, very few people were able to guess what this might mean for America’s approach to the world.
My generation has grown up regarding American engagement, American leadership of the free world, as natural, as a given. We have questioned whether we wanted it, but never stopped to question whether America wanted it. And what would happen if it did not. It is sobering to realise that America accepted its obligations as a conscious act of policy and that there is nothing natural or inevitable about it.
So why do I wish President Obama be revealed as a fool, a weakling, a ditherer? The President’s policy in Libya is certainly open to this interpretation. He has been half in and half out. Resistant to agreeing to action, he has nevertheless agreed to it, having waited until almost beyond the last minute to provide his consent. He has involved American planes, but withdrawn them just as quickly, leaving the British and French to get on with it, at a critical moment.
The message to the dictators of the Arab world has been equivocal. His policy has been: “We will fight them on the beaches, but we will need further discussion about the landing stations.”
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And I hope, I genuinely hope, that he has adopted this position because he is everything his enemies say he is: aloof, indecisive, inexperienced. For there is an alternative explanation. That Barack Obama, a phenomenal politician, a luminous political figure, probably heading to a clear second-term victory, knows exactly what he is doing. That he has understood the meaning of being leader of the free world, and doesn’t want the title. That he sees that Americans want to settle all their differences, then go to the movies and drink Coke.
There have been moments in modern American history where the country has embraced this approach. After the First World War, the United States turned away from Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism and elected, by a landslide, Warren Harding, who offered a “return to normalcy” — “not heroics, but healing ... not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality”. And the careers of the Wise Men came to an end with the failure in Vietnam, after which America endured a decade of self-doubt.
The years of isolation were dark years. As America retreated between the wars, the old world, as Churchill called it, was nearly overrun by the dictators and demagogues before the new world came to its rescue.
What has happened before can happen again. For some outside America, withdrawal is a coveted prize. But in a world without American leadership, who answers the phone when someone calls 999?
We talk so freely about the international community holding people to account, but without America, who is that?
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Americans pay with money and blood to help world order, to support democracy and peace in the world. Why should they? And what if they didn’t? Who will? Europe? I think not. China? Perhaps, but is that really what we want?
President Obama’s actions, or lack of action, in Libya may be decisiveness and not dithering; the first, careful step in a great historical withdrawal. Let’s hope that it isn’t.