The business of America is America — and we’d better get used to it
Matthew Parris
The answer to the question ‘Why do US presidents throw their weight around?’ is the same as the answer to the question ‘Why do dogs lick their balls?’ Because they can. British journalists and politicians are just going to have to get used to that.
How long before our ministers, backbenchers, leader-writers and columnists tumble to the fact that our views on America’s international posture are of little consequence? It is fairly immaterial whether we approve or disapprove of Washington’s stance on steel imports, the Middle East, the International Criminal Court, global warming, ‘star wars’, the death penalty, the policing of Afghanistan, or anything else. They do not give a tinker’s cuss. They do not need to.
How long before we understand that there is no point lecturing the Americans on how they might more tactfully build an ‘international consensus’ when they are not seriously trying to? How long before the penny drops in Islington, Barnsley, Edinburgh and, indeed, Brussels, and Europeans accept that the White House is not ignorant of, but indifferent to, our views? That America knows and cares little about our thoughts does seem to have occurred to some commentators here, but they treat it as though it were America’s problem. It is not; it is ours.
One fine day — and, if only for the sake of Finnish forests as yet unsacrificed to the paper mill, let it be soon — it will dawn on us British that it isn’t a matter of President Bush getting the wrong advice, or being guided by the wrong instincts, or getting the wrong end of the stick, and so failing to please us. He does not have to please us. Sneering at him, making jokes about his IQ, reciting his verbal stumbles and copying his accent is getting silly, and sounding increasingly like the gibberings of the powerless behind the back of someone who is too big to be troubled by the kids anyway.
It isn’t, anyway, a matter of President Bush at all: it’s the office, not the man. In the office of US President in the 21st century, the incumbent — any incumbent — is not subject to significant pressure from the smaller, friendly Western powers. Only the outer darkness, only attrition from invisible forces which stubbornly refuse to cohere into the shape of an enemy you can bomb, really scares them. In this I fear Osama bin Laden is right. We are the daylight and America is not afraid of the daylight. She is afraid of the night.
On reading this week’s headlines about America’s refusal to be part of the International Criminal Court I suffered a sustained and dizzying spell of seeing it from Washington’s point of view. Why should the Americans join the ICC if they do not want to? Are they not a sovereign nation with some reason to distrust progressive internationalists? America is not preventing other countries setting up whatever international courts we choose; she is simply declining to take part. Any claims we make to jurisdiction over non-participants are preposterous, and if we cannot assure Washington that US peacekeeping troops are safe from being dragged before this court, then — obviously again — her troops will come home.
Again, that’s our problem, not hers, and we really are stuck. To concede America’s demand and grant immunity to her peacekeepers would have to be matched by immunities for all peacekeepers. This would exempt a police force from the very rules it was there to police. Then the ICC would be accused of administering victor’s justice, the very charge which establishing the permanent court was supposed to answer. Let’s face it, fellow whingers: America has no intention of being subject to anything but the American Constitution.
Has it not yet dawned on the British political class that this is how boss nations behave? What earthly use is it separately to chronicle and individually to deplore every crass or clumsy intervention, every insensitivity to a smaller nation’s point of view, every instance in which the interests of the big power are allowed to ride roughshod over those of smaller ones? These will be the first of thousands. It is what we British used to do.
There is an awful inevitability about it all — so awful, and so inevitable that I am suffering a malaise unfamiliar to me as a columnist. I feel a sense of ennui about the whole thing before it has even properly started. I began writing in the vein this column displays not long after 11 September, and the more I wrote the plainer it seemed that commentary — let alone judgment — was pretty pointless. All big countries attuned to powerful interests and sentiment at home, and with no nation to challenge them abroad, always clump about the globe in heavy boots, making up their own rules as they go along. Any leader of any such nation will be sucked into acting this way, and if he is too fastidious to do so, he will fall to another who is not.
It isn’t pretty, it isn’t nice, it isn’t fair, and in the end they come a cropper, but the process takes decades, perhaps much longer, and it has hardly started. Already I weary of crowing ‘I told you so’ to the doe-eyed Atlanticists who supposed that to become the kindly and disinterested primus inter pares of the free world, all America needed was a kiss and a cuddle and a guiding hand from Tony Blair. I weary of shouting ‘Who cares what you think?’ at the liberal internationalist Left.
If, studying the isobars on a meteorological map, you saw an intense high-pressure system and a vast low-pressure system, you would know that before long the wind would rise between them and soon gather force, flattening anything flimsy in its path. You approve or deplore; you could stand by with a notebook and chart every premonitory rustle in the treetops; but why bother?
The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. ICC, Kyoto, Arafat, Iraq ...early chapters in a long story. If you want to be part of it, join America. If you want to impede it, join a terrorist group. If (as has happened with me) déjà vu has set in already, cultivate your garden.
America is unchallenged. America is behaving as though she is unchallenged. And your point is?
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
(Not that it matters, but I haven't been this depressed by an opinion piece since Julie Burchill wrote a not wholly dissimilar "who the fuck cares if I care?" column in the Guardian two years ago. It is reassuring to find that not all non-Atlanticist Tories are Christian apologists, however.)