(Dobbs) If We're In Decline, Can We Come Back?
Decline takes many forms. Some are discouraging.
Is America in decline? There are hazards at home and omens overseas. Our defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan— personified by this unnerving photo of a helicopter evacuating diplomats from the embassy in Kabul— makes many Americans worry. And, wonder: if we are in decline, can we recover?
These are fair questions. But they have been asked before. As many as 46 years before, when an eerily similar photo came out of Saigon.
But if, in the year 2021, we truly are in decline, from which direction is it coming? Home, or abroad?
Ambassador Dennis Ross— a preeminent Middle East negotiator and advisor for five presidential administrations— confronted concerns of a decline overseas in The New York Times: “Not since the fall of Saigon… has the United States been so vulnerable to fundamental questions about America’s reliability, about whether friends and allies will ever again be able to count on U.S. commitments.”
There is, to be sure, a cataclysm of credibility and confidence today in the United States, from American and foreign soil alike. But it’s not brand new. In all the years I covered news around the world, I saw different leaders and different cultures that didn’t share our values. They didn’t think like we think. They didn’t want what we want. They didn’t support what we support.
Right now, maybe it’s even worse. Condemnations of our Afghan withdrawal have come from allies as well as enemies. Even from Britain, the home of our most special relationship, where government ministers and members of Parliament have used words like “shameful,” “dishonorable,” “catastrophic.” Our enduring friend Tony Blair, who as prime minister joined American coalitions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, called it “imbecilic.”
But does this mean we cannot recover? Ambassador Ross’s answer comes in the title of his Times treatise: “U.S. Credibility Will Weather Afghanistan.” Because, as he wrote, the Vietnam debacle “did not spell the end of American leadership on the world stage.” Nor did the loss of Iran as an ally in 1979, let alone the hostage crisis. Nor the deaths of 241 United States Marines in Beirut. Nor the demise of U.S. airmen in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Nor our “Blackhawk Down” humiliation in Somalia. Nor even our failure to replace Saddam Hussein, once he was dethroned, with a sustainable and stable government in Iraq.
Like Afghanistan, we didn’t follow through on every commitment we made to avoid and sometimes retaliate for those debacles. But still, Ross argues, the U.S. can recoup, “just as it has before.”
I agree. Our allies might have reservations about our reliability, but it’s reasonable to surmise that they’ll continue to consider our rivals, from China to Russia to Iran, far less reliable than us. We still share common values. Those are the ties that bind.
The trouble is, any picture of America in decline overseas, whether valid or not, is not what worries me. What worries me is the picture here at home.
It’s a picture of a nation where racists have come out of their holes and audaciously advocated white power and openly opposed opportunities for minorities. It’s a picture of a nation where insurrectionists have come out of the shadows and violently revolted against our government. It’s a picture of a nation where elected officials like North Carolina congressman Madison Cawthorn have explicitly warned of bloodshed and said of their adversaries, “We will take them down, one at a time.”
It’s a picture of a nation where standards of decency and decorum have sunk to new lows. For many Americans there is no entertainment too lewd to watch. There are no words too obscene to openly utter. And although maybe low on the scale of decadence, after boarding a flight a few weeks ago in Sacramento and seeing a fellow passenger wearing pajama bottoms in place of pants, there is no convention too time-honored to violate.
It’s a picture of a nation so torn about science that tens of millions of Americans have forgotten the triumph of vaccines that conquered diseases like polio and now campaign against vaccines and masks to fight the pandemic, some even threatening if a school board mandates masks as one did in Santa Monica, California, “Civil war is coming, get your guns.”
It’s a picture of a nation so torn about politics that tens of millions of Americans support politicians who are relentlessly carving away at our rights.
If these people could see what I’ve seen— from Russia to Iran, from Zimbabwe to Nicaragua, and now even in Hong Kong, where citizens crave the kinds of freedoms we’ve long enjoyed but are punished if they try to exercise them— maybe they’d appreciate what we have here. Or maybe, in their selfishness, they wouldn’t.
In the wake of our loss in Afghanistan, a popular rightwing pundit unpatriotically proclaimed, “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal,” while the Proud Boys said with apparent admiration that the Taliban “took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters.” Even a member of Congress, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, tweeted that the Taliban is “more legitimate than… the current government here.”
These are saddening signs of a nation in decline.
Back in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our nation was united in its grief and its resolve, if only briefly. This was a nation in ascent. It was affirmation of something Henry Kissinger has written: “Democracies evolve in a conflict of factions. They achieve greatness by their reconciliations.” But now you have to wonder, if someone were to attack us again, would we even find that level of unity we saw 20 years ago? Are we capable of those reconciliations today? If not, maybe we are a nation in decline.
Early in the 20th Century, “to demonstrate to the world America’s naval prowess,” President Teddy Roosevelt sent out his “Great White Fleet,” a four-mile-long armada of sparkling white battleships that showed the flag on every continent. It put our nation on the world stage. We have been there ever since. Today, America’s fleet takes a broader form than Roosevelt’s. It still is a fleet of military might, but it also is a fleet of innovators, a fleet of alliances, and a fleet of generous and benevolent acts.
The question is, if we are even temporarily in decline, is that enough for us to recover? Especially with the domestic turmoil we see all around us? The U.S. Director of National Intelligence wrote in a recent report that we can expect homegrown extremists to try to engage this year in more acts of violence, and the Department of Homeland Security now calls violent domestic extremism the “greatest threat” to our nation.
A nation’s strength is gauged by many things: education, innovation, health, wealth, projections of power, stability in politics. And, as Dennis Ross said in The Times, credibility.
By some of those measures, America is not in decline. By others, it’s not so clear.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Well said once more Greg. My father was the military attaché to Afghanistan in the later half of the 60’s under King Doug. (Also chief of MAAG N. Vietnam in the early 50’s) Of the 170+ countries he’d been to, Afghanistan was the favorite “because of the people”! Ambassadors to Kabul, Neuman, senior and junior, were good friends. After retirement the Neumann’s and my folks made an overland holiday to Timbuktu. World situations are in constant flux but our greatest challenge comes from within.
We may be in decline. If we are it is because we have people like Trump, Boebert, Greene, and Gaetz representing some of us at the highest level. To quote Will Rogers "I wouldn't trust these people with a book of matches".