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In his travel book, American Notes, for instance, Charles Dickens recalls his loathing for much of what he saw on his adventures through the country. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. As one friend living in the States put it to me, there’s still a hell of a lot of glue holding the U.S. together, with or without Trump. From a European perspective, it is also striking to see the energy, the oratory, and the moral authority once again bubbling up from below—the beauty of America, not the ugliness. A quick look at the makeup of the European Parliament—or almost any European media outlet, law firm, or company board—is sobering for anyone inclined to believe it is the former. The friend told me he’d spotted graffiti on his way over: I can’t breathe. People. The street protests, the violence, and the racism of the past few weeks have erupted at the very moment the country’s institutional failings have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforced by its apparently unbridgeable partisan divide, which is now even infecting parts of the American machine that have so far been untouched: its federal agencies, diplomatic service, and the long-standing norms underpinning the relationship between civilians and the military. Lawrence Freedman, a war-studies professor at King’s College London, told me the institutions of American power themselves have been “battered.” The health system is struggling, the municipalities are financially broke, and, beyond the police and the military, little attention is being paid to the health of the state itself. “He hated America very deeply,” John le Carré wrote of his fictional Soviet mole, Bill Haydon, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. American financial and military might meant that even their combined power was irrelevant. Take the confusion over the coming G7 summit in September. A European ambassador told me Trump himself is an expression of American decline. That one is new. He cited Europe’s need to “up its game” on defense spending, the American willingness to put China’s trade practices on the table, and Trump’s pushback against Iran in the Middle East. To some extent, the U.K. and France are on the journey to become the Netherlands, and the U.S. is on the journey to be Britain and France.” Bruno Maceas, Portugal’s former Europe minister, whose book The Dawn of Eurasia looks at the rise of Chinese power, told me, “The collapse of the American empire is a given; we are just trying to figure out what will replace it.”. In London and Paris, however, there is an increasing acknowledgment that this cannot be the case—that there has been a fundamental and permanent shift. Why, if it is the latter, have there not been marches in Europe over the mass incarceration of Uighur Muslims in China, the steady stifling of democracy in Hong Kong, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, or against murderous regimes across the Middle East, such as Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia? First, he said, there is more support for the substance of Trump’s foreign policy than might appear. What makes things different now, according to Duclos, is the extent of division within the United States and the lack of leadership in the White House. That one is new, even if the schadenfreude is painfully myopic. It is as if Trump were confirming some of the accusations leveled at America by its most fervent critics—even when those claims are not true. It was released as the second official single from the group's debut studio album Hot Fuss (2004), and was written by band members Brandon Flowers, Mark Stoermer, Dave Keuning and Ronnie Vannucci Jr..In an interview with Rolling Stone, Brandon Flowers said: "This is the story of trying to meet someone in a club." And we now have a second location in Trophy Club. But as le Carré observed, it is also, largely, an aesthetic thing—we don’t like what we see when we look hard, because we see ourselves. Demonstrators have marched in Australia and New Zealand, both of which have their own distinct racial divides and history of abuse, as well as in Britain and France, each with histories of colonialism and continuing race and class divisions. America seems mired, its very ability to rebound in question. What, do you think our country is so innocent?” (Before he became president, Trump also praised China’s apparent strength in violently suppressing the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests.). In Tinker Tailor, Haydon at first attempts to justify his betrayal with a long political apologia, but, in the end, as he and le Carré’s hero, the master spy George Smiley, both know, the politics are just the shell. In Moscow and Beijing, for starters, it would not be possible to protest in such numbers and with such vehemence. Le Carré is just one of many who have delved into the conflicting well of emotions that the United States manages to stir in those who watch from outside, part horrified, part obsessed. Occasionally, the tone and the music have even come together to alienate America’s closest allies, as under George W. Bush, who was widely mocked, reviled, and opposed abroad. It is remarkable, as Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post has pointed out, that it took the death of a black man in Minneapolis for Belgian authorities to pull down a statue of the person responsible for some of the most heinous colonial crimes in history. The beauty of America seemed to have gone, the optimism and charm and easy informality that entrances so many of us from abroad. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. Worst of all, he said, “they don’t know how to fix it.”, Such are the internal divisions, in fact, that many foreign observers are now concerned that the divisions are affecting Washington’s ability to protect and project its power abroad. Trump today hears no unifying music—only the dull beat of self-interest. Please enable Cookies and reload the page. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly. Request a meeting with me or invite me to speak at an event. As the world watches the United States, is it the tone or the music that is causing such a visceral response? The whole thing looked so ugly at first—so full of hate, and violence, and raw, undiluted prejudice against the protesters. In a letter, Dickens summed up his feelings: “I am disappointed. “But I think there will come a time when America decides, in its own interest, to reengage, so I’m optimistic that America will, in the end, understand that this is not about relegating your self-interest behind the common interest; it’s an understanding that by acting collectively in alliance with others, you promote your own interests. Haydon had just been unmasked as a double agent at the heart of Britain’s secret service, one whose treachery was motivated by animus, not so much to England but to America. Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit, Over America’s history, it has had any number of crises—and any number of detractors. Like Dickens, the world expects more of America. The British historian Andrew Roberts and others have noted, for example, that a seam of anti-Americanism runs through le Carré’s novels, finding its expression in a moral equivalence that does not stand up to scrutiny. The immediate concern for many of those I interviewed was the apparent hollowing out of American capacity. For Haydon and many others like him in the real world, this visceral loathing proved so great that it blinded them to the horrors of the Soviet Union, ones that went far beyond the aesthetic. Today’s convulsions are not without precedent—many I spoke with cited previous protests and riots, or America’s diminished standing after the Iraq War in 2003 (a war, to be sure, supported by Britain and other European countries)—yet the confluence of recent events and modern forces has made the present challenge particularly dangerous. Right now, the extent of Europe’s strategy appears to be to simply wait out Trump and hope life can return to the previous “rules-based” international order after he leaves office. album: "Milk And Honey" (1984) I'm Stepping Out. The world has, after all, opposed the music of American policy before: over Vietnam and Iraq, world trade, and climate change. We work to create environments where all children and youth are healthy and thriving, cared for and protected, and making a positive contribution to their communities. //]]>. Read: How China is planning to win back the world. “Today, it is much worse,” he said. Today, with Beijing overseeing the mass surveillance of its citizens and incarcerating one ethnic-minority group almost en masse, the same can be said of China. At these moments, however, men of stature occupied the White House—flawed, sometimes corrupt, occasionally even criminal, but all sure of America’s unique role in the world. //
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