Sherry Chandler

Photos by Morgan Williams and T.R. Williams

I have envied Sam Martin his mama fox who comes to eat dog food in his yard. And then there was Harry’s photographs of the red fox and the red cat. Foxes are not wont to come too close to houses in densely settled areas. So I was thrilled that one came to partake of Ursula’s gleanings at approximately 5:45 p.m. EST today.

I should explain that we put our “empty” cat food cans out for Ursula to clean up.

William Pfaff argues not in his article Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America, in the current New York Review of Books:

For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the limited, specific, and ultimately successful postwar American policy of “patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies…and pressure against the free institutions of the Western world” (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for “ending tyranny in the world.”[1]

The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.

This is where the problem lies. Other American leaders before George Bush have made the same claim in matters of less moment. It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not.

…It is true that by establishing a republic, Americans made themselves successors to the dynastic monarchies of Europe (although the Dutch Republic and Swiss Federation preceded us). But that God had taken a hand in this, nominating us as his Chosen and confiding to us an earthly mission, has yet to be demonstrated, and a moral theologian might see in the claim the grave sin of Presumption.

Pfaff argues, and it’s easy enough to convince me, that economic, and even cultural, pressures trump force of arms in this modern-world-of-today and that our current dependence on force tends to make us more and more irrelevant. We are, after all, financing this “war on terror” with borrowed money. Pretty soon China will own us and I don’t think Bush-pater’s friends will be able to bail little Georgie out this time.

Pfaff’s is an argument for a new isolationism, at least as far as armed forces are concerned. I’m not sure that I’m convinced on all points. Hard to think there is nothing we can do in Darfur, for example, though in fact there is nothing we are doing. No, it’s worse than that. According to Pfaff, what we are doing is subsuming the situation in Africa into our “global war on terror.”

Still it’s worth a read and some thought. I learned a lot reading it. For example that:

…in the summer of 2003 …Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s national security adviser, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies …said that the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty. The UN is a faulty embodiment of international authority because it is an indiscriminate assembly of all the governments of the world, and should, she argued, be replaced as the ultimate world authority by an alliance or coalition of the democracies. This is a theme frequently promoted in conservative circles in Washington. …”Multipolarity,” she continued, “is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests—and at its worst, competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War….”

Pax Americana.

Manifest Destiny.

It’s becoming such a theme here that perhaps I should set up a category for it. It was a stupid idea in the 19th century and it’s still a stupid idea in the 21st.