Every week, I publish an op/ed in newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06). Here is the one that’s running this week.
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In a famous passage, the ancient Greeks declared that “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
It is one of the great tragedies of human history that there has been so much truth in this characterization of “how the world goes.” To say that “right is only in question between equals in power” is to say that right is never really in question at all. That would mean, if it were true, that things are always ordered to suit the mighty without regard for justice.
Perhaps nothing has made me prouder as an American than the role my country has played, during my lifetime, to make the order in the world better than how the Greeks described it.
I recognize that the United States, being strong, has often yielded to the temptation of doing “what it can,” and making the weak suffer what they must. (Ask the peoples of Central America.)
But it is also true that in the wake of World War II, and for much of the time since, the United States accomplished something quite extraordinary in the annals of human history: while being the world’s mightiest nation, the United States led in the creation of orders that, along many dimensions, served to empower and elevate those it might have subordinated.
Perhaps nothing demonstrated the American contribution to overcoming the reign of the powerful over the weak more than the contrast between the two superpower blocs in Europe during the Cold War: the alliance of free nations that United States created in Western Europe contrasted sharply with the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe—the alternative in which the strong coerced everyone else into dismal submission. More mutual consent, less coercion.
But there was much more.
As “the leader of the free world,” the United States (at least much of the time) advanced the values of democracy and human rights. In other words, The U.S. furthered its founders’ ideal: power should be wielded not just to serve the interests of the strong but only with “the consent of the governed,” for even the weak to enjoy certain “unalienable rights,” against which the power of the strong would be forbidden to trespass.
The United States also created international economic institutions – like the IMF and the World Bank – and a system of world trade to foster global economic prosperity and stability that served the material well-being of a great many people around the world. Mutual benefit, rather than the ancient pattern of plunder of the weak by the mighty.
The United States strengthened the role in world affairs of international law and of treaties entered into by the mutual consent of nations.
Even the environmental challenges can be perceived in these terms, i.e. the need for a more synergistic order than just “the strong doing what it can,” with the earth’s dominant species forcing the system as a whole to suffer what it must.
The American record in the environmental area has admittedly been spotty, but over the past fifty years -- even amidst the many ways the short-term greed of corporate powers has overpowered the necessity for long-term sustainability -- the United States has often played a leadership role in this arena, too.
Indeed, overall, with all its imperfections, I would venture to say that the leadership of the American superpower in the post-World-War II world – for all its flaws -- represents one of the finest chapters in all of human history. America’s true greatness: leading in the directions humankind must go if the human future is to be good rather than catastrophic.
But look at the turn America has now taken:
Under its present leadership, the United States has been simultaneously embracing gangster-rulers around the world while stiff-arming the nations organized around those ideals -- of government for and by the people -- that America has long represented to the world.
In particular, this American leadership has consistently advanced the interests of the thuggish regime of Putin and his resurgent Russia—the major adversary not only of the United States but also of the values of democracy and liberty and justice that America used to represent. We are now aligned with the forces of oppression and aggression.
In recent years, our nation has
chosen the path of trade wars; undermined or torn up valuable treaties; ceased to be a model for “the rule of law,” with a President who has consistently acted to put himself above the law, emulating the ways of dictatorship.And on the most pressing environmental challenge confronting humankind – the destabilization of the earth’s climate – America now has a President who is the world’s biggest obstacle to humankind’s taking responsible action to harmonize human activity with the health of life-on-earth (on which strong and weak alike rely for our survival). He has made the United States no longer an important part of the solution, but a major part of the problem.
And all this some regard as making America “great again.”