Redeeming America

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Today, America's narcissism has blinded its citizens to a host of looming dangers, including the spread of infectious diseases, the reality of climate change, and the tinderbox of troubles in failed states. What's more, Murphy writes, we've fallen prey to 'the conviction that assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is.'

We've seen the disastrous consequences of this refusal to acknowledge reality in Iraq, from the administration's flowers-in-the-street postinvasion plan to its unyielding faith that a few thousand extra troops can put the lid back on a civil war. More generally, this perspective has skewed Americans into believing that we are the world's moral center as well as its power center.

'We see ourselves as selfless, as adopting positions that represent only a higher good,' writes veteran diplomatic negotiator Dennis Ross in Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Such pretense is not only radically out of step with the way the world sees us in the wake of Abu Ghraib; it's perilous for practical purposes as well. 'If we act only out of a higher purpose,' Ross explains, 'how easy is it to compromise with those who don't?'

In a world where the line between domestic and global problems is evaporating--where pandemics brewing in chicken coops in Asia can land on our runways, where the greenhouse gases belching from our SUVs dry up Africa's arable land--we'll have to step down from the moral high ground to reality. We'll need to work with others, listen to their ideas, and sometimes follow their lead.

That will undoubtedly be a tough sell for a populace reared on a national messianism that reaches far beyond the 'Proud to Be an American' set. Even well-meaning liberals like Senators John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein parrot the refrain that we must restore our moral authority. But such an imperative is undermined by the very claim to superiority it presumes. Our moral compass certainly needs resetting, but our efforts should be calibrated to reestablish our moral credibility. That way, when we need to call on the world--for our own security or for those in Darfur--we'll not only be heard, we'll be believed.

When Bush delivered his speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in April, he began by mourning the 32 lives that had been senselessly lost in the shootings at Virginia Tech University just two days earlier. The two tragedies had been improbably linked in the person of Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old engineering professor and Holocaust survivor who used his body to barricade a classroom door as his students fled through the window to safety.

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