Why Don't We Talk Anymore?

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When Greece and Turkey, two parliamentary democracies and NATO allies, almost went to war in 1996 over the Aegean rocks of Imia/Kardak, for instance, it was not for 'rational' reasons -- to gain seasonal grazing rights for a dozen goats or to extend their overfished territorial waters by a few square kilometers. Similarly, when various U.S. presidents have implied that they would defend Taiwan even at the cost of an exchange of nuclear missiles with China, it was not because they made a rational calculation that Taiwanese democracy was worth 50 million American deaths. In each case the rational calculation was on matters much closer to home.

'States' and 'nations' are useful concepts as conversational shorthand, but they don't think or act or have interests. They don't make decisions or carry them out. Only human beings do. And real people in real life are completely engrossed in a million-year-old competition for food, for mates, and, most compellingly, for their standing in the social hierarchy surrounding them.

The preoccupation of leaders everywhere, whether they are elected Jeffersonian democrats or blood-drenched military despots, is to appear legitimate to their followers. Ideally, good governance would be enough. In practice, however, American politicians shrink from hard but necessary challenges like reforming health care and reducing greenhouse gases because any decision would destroy their standing with some key constituency. Many foreign leaders are even less brave, because a loss of legitimacy could be fatal. The gridlock Americans detest in their own Congress is a fact of life in every political system on the planet.

To break this gridlock, politicians shamelessly exploit every source of legitimacy we social primates have evolved: heredity, territoriality, religion, and the instinct to rally around leaders who prove their will to resist predators. Human moral instincts are strong and unforgiving, so politicians edit the world to exploit them. They recast the struggle for ownership of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a holy war between good and evil. An ominous phrase -- 'international communism,' 'weapons of mass destruction,' 'Islamo-fascism' -- becomes an implacable foe. By branding a tribal thug named Saddam Hussein as Adolf Hitler and then toppling him, President Bush basked in the heartfelt applause of millions of Americans and earned himself a second term in office.

It's completely natural for the leader of a superpower to indulge the temptation to re-arrange the world as a dramatic backdrop for domestic politics. Every successful politician in the world does the same. Only a superpower, however, has the military and diplomatic muscle to make the real world resemble its illusions -- at least for a few weeks. As President Bush posed for the television cameras under the 'Mission Accomplished' banner on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln six weeks after Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched, Iraq was already going up in flames again. The limits of U.S. power were about to become brutally clear.

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