Redeeming America

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America's global tailspin has been well-documented. The analyses, which follow a similar narrative arc, line bookstores' new-release shelves, dominate op-ed banter, and help countless pundits fill the 24-hour news cycle: After the September 11 attacks, President Bush and his neoconservative cadre squandered the goodwill of the world with a disastrous war of choice in Iraq, then began a dizzying campaign of disengagement from international accords on critical global issues such as arms control, torture, and climate change.

The failures of the Bush administration--from Katrina to Guantanamo, 'unitary executive theory' to 'enemy combatant'--also did damage to the mythology, invoked by everyone from America's presidents to its history teachers, that the United States is a light unto other nations, a 'shining city upon a hill,' in the parlance of Ronald Reagan.

Given the symptoms of decline, the commonly cited prescriptions for restoring America's status seem obvious. Reengage the international community. Take the lead on climate change. Drop the pursuit of a more advanced nuclear arsenal. Ensure that government can provide basic services. Rejoin the International Criminal Court. Bring back habeas corpus. Commit to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Stop torturing people.

'What to do is fairly clear,' says Morton Halperin, coeditor of Power and Superpower: Global Leadership and Exceptionalism in the 21st Century, recently published by the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, where he serves as a senior fellow. 'It's whether we have a president willing to do it.'

America's strange breed of isolationism and interventionism didn't begin with Bush, however, and it's not likely to end with him unless there's a major shift in priorities. If the intention is to create an international reputation that can transcend any one leader and survive a rapidly changing global landscape, a more foundational transformation is necessary--one that requires the American people and their politicians to rethink the way they see the world and their place in it.

'One notable constant in American history is our lack of awareness of the rest of the world--or, if we're aware, our indifference to whether we've got the world right,' Cullen Murphy writes in Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

Murphy diagnoses this myopia as the recurrence of an ancient affliction known as Omphalos syndrome: the misguided belief that one's polity is the center, or navel (omphalos), of the world. For Rome, it was a malignant condition that, among other things, blinded the city-state to a fatal external threat: the Hun conquests that drove hordes of displaced barbarians to Rome's gates.

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