“I don’t like what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” This phrase perhaps best sums up the classic American credo that is now embraced by virtually all the West’s representative self-governments and especially of the European Union. I do hate to disagree with our authors, but Serhiy Ponomariov’s material on whether the US will survive 2002 leaves one truly speechless in its na Х vet О concerning what America is all about. As The Day’s resident American, I feel obliged to make a few brief observations. Of course, all empires will fall, just as in general all things will pass, but no responsible person is predicting the breakup of the United States anytime soon or even its being possible. No one, that is, except our learned author. In the current crisis America has shown remarkable self-restraint, carefully distinguishing, on the one hand, between its enemy, the terrorists, and, on the other, Islam and the people of Afghanistan. Dropping refugees such uniquely American delicacies as peanut butter and jelly or pop tarts might seem a bit ill-advised, but at least some effort is being made.
Actually, America never really set out to become a superpower. George Washington counseled against “entangling alliances,” and other of its founding fathers called on America to be a “city on a hill,” an example for the rest of the world to take or leave. In truth, America has been remarkably successful in presenting an example of both how to do things and on occasion how not to (recall the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Cherokee removal, racial discrimination, or the internment of the Japanese in World War II). After World War I it stayed out of the League of Nations its own president had dreamed up, and it took up the gauntlet in the Cold War only after its leadership was able to “scare the hell out” of the American people with its own negative consequence, McCarthyism, during which some people were unfairly blacklisted from their professions but there was nothing of such magnitude as the Soviet Gulag. Americans have their moments of madness just like everyone else, but they usually manage to keep them more or less under control. Certainly, being leader of the Free World (if there still is one) is quite flattering, but in their heart of hearts, America’s strain of isolationism should never be underestimated. America will be quite willing to pass on the mantle of world leadership to some fitting candidate, should the circumstances arise.
Will Europe supplant America as the world’s leading power? It remains to be seen. First of all, the euro zone is not the entire European Union, and it remains to be seen how this entity will deal with the inevitable strains. But more importantly, given the fundamental values that Europe and America share — the rule of law, individual liberties, civil society, and a market economy — even if pax Americana should be replaced by a pax Europa, this in itself would be the ultimate triumph of Americanism in its finest sense.
