Superpowers

Americans in general, especially republicans, and more especially Mormon republicans, seem to deify America’s history and role in the world. Many even imply that some imagined record of impeccable foreign dealings justify America’s interference in world affairs. I often chuckle as Americans tell me about our squeaky clean national past and moral superiority. I sometimes want to ask them if they have ever heard of the Mexican-American war, the Bay of Pigs, slavery, or segregation. What we did in Texas in the 1830s isn’t much different from the Israeli settlement initiative that so many, me included, find offensive. Of course America, like every country, person, or institution has made mistakes, and at time acted in her own self interest when the just, honorable thing would have been to do otherwise. America’s greatness isn’t rooted in having been perfect, neither is any other entity’s. However I do think that America has been and is a great country, infact I think that those who demonize America are further off the mark than those who deify it. While living abroad, I often felt like a representative of the US. Indeed, I am one of the few Americans that many friends and acquaintances in Europe know. I was often asked why America felt that it could police the world and intervene in everyone else’s affairs. At the time I didn’t have a very good answer. Now I do. I got the answer from Spiderman: with great power, comes great responsibility. I am impressed that America does choose to get involved in world problems. Admittedly this is often for her own interests, but not always. The UN exists on the back of US dollars. Woodrow Wilson’s idealism and hope for a completely self-determined world has survived the collapse of the League of Nations, and survives both in most Americans minds as well as in her military action. Does she make mistakes, of course, but she does so generally attempting to do good. We often only look at the major, and usually unpopular conflicts, like Vietnam and Iraq to measure US foreign intervention. This is far too simplistic a scope because of worldwide small scale interventions often unreported in the news. We also sometimes see only the dark side of larger scale interventions. I don’t mean to imply that wars aren’t hideous, nor that conflicts like Iraq are justified or well executed. However, wars are fought by real people, with real emotional response to the world around them. Anecdotally, I spoke with a colonel this weekend who expressed frustration with the media’s portrayal of conflicts in general as well as Iraq in particular. He mentioned to me that he left the base far more often in humanitarian outreach than in combat, but as he drove out of camp past the PR tent to invite them, they would only come if there were a chance of a firefight because those stories sold. America’s greatness on the world stage would disappear if we retreated into an isolationist cocoon. On the other side of the coin, we don’t have the right to police the world, but for the world’s superpower to sit by and do nothing is to waste her power, and to proclaim her ideology as no better than any other. While deifing America is going too far, demonizing it is even worse. We need look no further than the Marshall plan to see the importance and the remarkable positive impact that a superpower's intervention can have. To sit by and do nothing is missing the opportunity to use power for good.