Before I moved to France, I took some French lessons with a French philosopher. He was a triple PhD, a perfectionist, and a maniac bordering on the psychologically disturbed. In his previous life, this led to complications; he’d lost a good job at a major university due to inter-departmental squabbles based upon his intransigeance on grading students he felt didn’t work hard enough. He now was doing whatever he could to keep food on the table. Though I didn’t learn much, it wasn’t due to his lack of trying. Learning a language on paper and being in a place where everyone speaks it, usually with slang and short cuts, are different.
My lessons took place in his apartment where, each time I stepped in, I felt I was transported to Europe. I recall watching him prepare an omelet with such finesse—beginning with melting a hunk of butter in a skillet over leaping flames, chopping up the onions, throwing in various herbs, whipping the eggs endlessly—that it was a shame to eat it. Sometimes we’d have lunch and then sit around and talk. Once he said to me that in France politics was a game.
Though in the Trump Age many Americans have taken up politics as a passion, the French have always felt that. By far the favorite subject for these commentaries is the USA and its traditional role as leader in the modern world. Depending on what day it is, the USA is either responsible for all the world’s problems, a maleficent juggernaut pulling the strings of the world or a failing superpower.
As an American, sometimes hearing this, it seems the expression of jealousy, or the projection of subterranean desires for the return to the Glorious Epoch where France was a superpower and French was the internationally recognized language of diplomacy.
The USA is at a crisis point, but there’s nothing new in that—the Vietnam War, Watergate, the loss of its manufacturing capacity to Asia, the reliance on foreign oil, the influence of domestic and foreign lobbies, the supposed infiltration of the White House by apocalyptically-minded Fundamentalist Christians, threat of nuclear war, etc. The end is near at least once every couple years.
America has succeeded in its primary objective: to make over the entire world in its image. From the opening of Japan by gunboat diplomacy in 1853–54 onwards the USA has had one objective: to turn every country into a market economy. It’s done so admirably with an unbroken series of successes as soon as it entered the world stage.
Once war was about conquering, destruction and spoils. This was the model throughout history, look at Troy, Carthage, etc. That’s changed. War’s now like a visiting card; like a teenage mixer. It’s the way the USA meets the only people it trusts, its enemies. Antigonus II Gonatas, a Hellenistic king of Macedon said: “I know that my friends are my enemies, and my enemies my friends.” With an enemy you take nothing for granted: a friend might stab you in the back, you expect it from an enemy.
Did the USA really lose the Vietnam War? They’re now producing Samsung phones, Nike tennis shoes, Intel chips, etc. That was the goal and it was achieved albeit at a horrific cost. With this in mind we can ask, is there any country in the world that has maintained its original culture and not been transformed under the influence of the USA?
This success has led to a problem for the U.S. The world has embraced what was imposed upon them; do they need America anymore? Every country is a mini-USA in-progress now, wrapped up not in any traditional culture of local costumes and dances, but rather in supply and demand, armaments, world markets, tourism, endless Master of Business Administration degrees and infrastructure development. And, dangerously, just like in the USA, people in these countries look back at their lost past with nostalgia, knowing it’s gone forever. This leads to fanaticism, fear and a need to fill the vacuum of purposelessness. We’ve entered the Technological Dark Ages.
Can the USA transition to be on equal terms with the countries it’s always dictated to? It’s interesting to try to imagine a USA as one country among many rather than being Number One. Perhaps America will finally have to become political rather than a dominant, dictating force. Even more importantly, what will its new mission be?