it.9 In the early Nineties, Israelis wanted normaliut, badly. They regarded themselves as a western democracy and wished to live like one. Instead of having to be on the military call-up list till you’re European retirement age (fifty-five), they wanted to be like other westerners and worry about their vacation destinations and the quality of their stereo systems. The Oslo Accords were a vote for normaliut—a vote to be like Oslo, for the chance to live as a Middle Eastern Norway. In return, they got an Arafatist squat and then exterminationist Iranian proxies on their borders, and suicide bombers on their buses, and in the wider world isolation, demonization, and delegitimization, accompanied by a resurgent and ever more respectable anti-Semitism.
In 2008, the U.S. electorate voted to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore and they’d rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan. In the old days, declining powers seeking to arrest either their own decline or another’s rise would turn to war—see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have post-modern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely.
In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. It too yearns for normaliut.
So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009.
How’s that working out?
In 2010, Zogby International and the University of Maryland conducted an “Arab Public Opinion Poll” for the Brookings Institution.10 They interviewed respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called “moderate” Arab Street. So how did President Obama do with the citizens of our allies after all the Islamoschmoozing and other outreach to the Muslim world?
In 2008, the last year of the Bush Texas-cowboy terror, 83 percent of Arabs had a very or somewhat negative view of the United States.11 By 2010, the second year of the Obama apology tour, 85 percent had a very or somewhat negative view. So much for the outreach.
So if they don’t like Obama, who do they like? The poll asked which world leader (other than their own) do you most admire? Here’s the Top Twelve: 1) Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey (20 percent); 2) Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (13 percent); 3) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (12 percent); 4) Hassan Nasrallah, head honcho of Hizb’Allah (9 percent); 5) Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria (7 percent); 6) Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France (6 percent); 7) Osama bin Laden, Abbottabad’s leading pornography aficionado (6 percent); 8) Jacques Chirac, the retired Gallic charmer (4 percent); 9) Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (4 percent); 10) Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt (4 percent); 11) Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid, Emir of Dubai (3 percent); 12) Saddam Hussein, Iraq War loser (2 percent).
What a hit parade! Twenty percent voted for the avowedly Islamist leader of a formerly secular pluralist Turkey; 57 percent voted for current dictators, dead dictators, thugs, terrorists, and a couple of wealthy minor princelings of the Muslim world; and the remainder celebrated diversity with Hugo Chavez and a pair of French roues. Maybe if Obama abased himself even more ostentatiously, maybe if next time he bows to the King of Saudi Arabia he licks the guy’s feet, maybe then he can boost his numbers up to Jacques Chirac level.
But, just as fascinating was the so-called “realist” reaction of the pollsters’ clients, the Brookings Institution. They took all the above as a sign that America needs to work harder to distance itself from negative perceptions that it’s too closely allied with Israel.
I don’t think so. America could join Iran in a nuclear strike on the Zionist Entity, and those numbers wouldn’t shift significantly. Because sometimes who you are is more important than anything you do. America will discover, as Israel did, that a one-way urge for normaliut will lead to a more dangerous world. In the vacuum of U.S. retreat, anti-Americanism will nevertheless metastasize and crowd in from our borders. In 2010
American isolation is already under way. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer, the world’s biggest exporter, the post-colonial patron of resource-rich Africa, the post-downturn patron of cash-strapped Mediterranean Europe, and the biggest trading partner of India, Brazil, and other emerging powers. Why be surprised that in such a world, getting on with America matters less and less? Sometimes that’s good news: Washington and its geriatric EU allies wanted the bonkers Copenhagen “climate change” deal; Brazil and India joined with China to block it.
Sometimes it’s not so good: the leaders of Brazil (again) and Turkey, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama during his first year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and subsequently took China’s position on Iranian nukes.13 But, either way, second-tier powers around the globe are making their dispositions, and telling us very plainly about what awaits. In 2010, the Royal Australian Navy participated in its first ever naval exercises with Beijing;14 a few weeks later, Britain and Germany declined to support the U.S. in its efforts to get China to increase the value of the yuan.15 Even for America’s closest allies, the dominance of both the Pentagon and the almighty dollar is conditional.
The world after America is beginning to take shape, a planet where the loons and the hard men make the running and the rest go along to get along.
Picture the UN a few years down the road: for three of the Security Council’s permanent members (Britain, France, Russia), an accommodation with Islam will be a domestic political imperative, and getting along with China will be the overriding foreign priority. In the practical sense, this will shrink “the West” and destroy the post-war balance of power in which three permanent members from the free world balanced two authoritarian powers.
Nudge things a little further down the road—a fractious planet of hostile forces—Russia, China, a semi- Islamized Europe, the aspiring caliphate, whatever the new Chavismo bequeaths Latin America—all mutually anti- pathetic yet for whom the flailing America remains the biggest and most inviting target. There will be no “new world order,” only a world with no order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, whatever survives of the United States will still be the most inviting target—first because it’s big; and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.
Listen to the way Washington’s European “allies” and Sunni Arab “allies” and UN “human rights” bigwigs talk about the Jewish state today. That’s how they’ll be talking about the U.S. tomorrow. In a post-American world, the kind of world Barack Obama is committed to building, America will be surrounded on all sides by hostile forces and more globally demonized than ever. Another half-a-decade on, and there’ll be an informal Islamoveto over European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America’s not.
They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame Washington for the horrors of the new age more furiously than ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and appeasers. He’s the warm-up act, and that’s the reception Washington will get in a world after American power.
Western civilization is a synthesis—a multicultural synthesis, if you like: Athenian democracy, Roman law, the Hebrew Bible, dispersed by London to every corner of the globe. If Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are the three temple mounts of the modern world and all its blessings, none has had a rougher ride than the last: attacked, besieged, captured, and recaptured dozens of times across the centuries—and twice destroyed. Today, Jerusalem is home to the Knesset and all Israeli government ministries, and the universally unrecognized capital of a universally delegitimized nation. Because the civilized world could not summon up the will to prevent Iran going nuclear, Israel will live on a thin line between the advanced civilized state they have built and oblivion, a permanent state of high alert in which the difference between first-world prosperity and extinction will come down to the hair-trigger reactions of bureaucratic monitoring of an implacable foe.
