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October 9, 2004

Too Much Not Enough Involved

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

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Expat Yank makes a fine point that I've thought about myself from time to time: even if the US were to go isolationist and pull back its forces from around the world, it would not be sufficient to silence America's critics. After all, keep in mind what Bush was criticized for in his foreign policy before 9/11: disengagement from the world. President Bush on assuming office began to pull the US out of the toughest situations abroad, declaiming any "peacekeeping" role, and in particular utterly rejecting the concept of "nation building".

Yet we were not praised for our farsighted wisdom in letting others do what they want, but were instead derided for disengagement. Even now, when we are engaged broadly in the Middle East and (lesser known) Africa and Asia, we are criticised for not being in the middle of the Israeli/Palestinian problem, and for not having already solved every problem in sub-Saharan Africa, and for ignoring any number of problems in the world. And at the same time we are castigated for being too involved in the world, for taking on problems that should be left alone.

It comes down to this, and this alone: anti-Americanism is no more rational than anti-Semitism, and nothing that the US can do or not do will silence our critics. John Kerry can make, should he be elected, any policy changes he wants, and our critics at home and abroad will smile as they stick the knife in, rather than frowning as they stick the knife in. This actually is very liberating: we can take the actions we need to take to defend ourselves, to remake the world, and to help our allies, and the volume and vituperativeness of the criticism will not change. Effectively, we are immune to criticism on foreign policy, so long as we remember that our critics are responding to our existence and our status, not our actions.