The problem is not isolationism, which is not a real policy, anyway. (It’s a pose.) The problem is not that America withdraws from the world. The problem is solipsism. It is that the people in the country are told, over and over again, that they live in a society so exceptional that the immutable rules of history and power apply elsewhere, but not here. One of the most bizarre reactions to the attacks of September 11, 2001 came when the president said that “we” had all thought that the oceans kept us safe. If “we” thought that, we were idiots. Most of us grew up with thousands of Russian ICBM’s aimed at us. Most of us lived through the events of October, 1962 in which it looked very much like those missiles would be launched, and that the Atlantic tides were unlikely to bring any of them down. Oceans keep you safe? Really? Ask the Aztecs. I don’t think anyone really felt that way. But what we did do was affect shock that what could happen overseas could happen here. That’s because we withdrew in our capacities as citizens from the making not only of military policy, but also of diplomatic policy as well. Politics don’t stop at the water’s edge. They just look like they do. Self-government doesn’t stop there.
We need to know what our government is doing in regard to these events, and not just in its capacity to “keep us safe.” There’s more going on here than the possible threat to American shopping malls. We need to know what our government’s policies are, and what the effects of those policies are, in the places in the world we otherwise ignore. The shredding of the foreign bureaus by most of our major media outlets was a bean-counting disgrace when it began that has become a calamity now. (The triumph of the Internet mitigates this somewhat, but when most of the cultural, political and institutional forces in your society seem to be singing from the same hymnal as regards to how little we should care about those places in the world, then it’s hard to bestir people to go on-line to see what’s happening in Mali these days.)
The shrinking of foreign-policy debate into a Procrustean with-us-or-against-us-war-on-terra context does us no good service. Certainly, there’s a debate to be had about our military posture overseas, and how we deal with the very real monsters who perpetrate these acts, and whether or not how we deal with them does more harm than good. But there’s also a debate to be had about using places like Africa, and the people who live there, as merely disposable raw materials in the soulless machine that is global capitalism. There’s a debate to be had about the other forms of imperial adventurism — cultural, financial, moral. And we can’t have that debate unless events like what’s happening in Kenya now cease to come as such a surprise to us, and unless we recognize that “How Does This Affect Me?” is not the ultimate question under discussion here as the mall goes up in flames.
We didn’t lose our innocence on September 11. We lost our immunity. We should not pretend otherwise.
Twice in one day, but…
