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Aug. 21st, 2012
"The Day of the Sun"
Aug. 21st, 2012 09:00 amArriving early at the limit of understanding,
I managed to find a good seat,
and settled in with the others,
who were fanning away the heat
with their programs full of blank pages.
The orchestra was in place,
and soon the show started.
First, deep space
rose high and flooded the stage,
immersing all the spots
where our thoughts could have fixed
if our minds had thoughts.
Which they didn’t. Then
the sun came out and stood.
That was all that happened,
and ever would.
-- "The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri
I managed to find a good seat,
and settled in with the others,
who were fanning away the heat
with their programs full of blank pages.
The orchestra was in place,
and soon the show started.
First, deep space
rose high and flooded the stage,
immersing all the spots
where our thoughts could have fixed
if our minds had thoughts.
Which they didn’t. Then
the sun came out and stood.
That was all that happened,
and ever would.
-- "The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri
"The Day of the Sun"
Aug. 21st, 2012 09:00 amArriving early at the limit of understanding,
I managed to find a good seat,
and settled in with the others,
who were fanning away the heat
with their programs full of blank pages.
The orchestra was in place,
and soon the show started.
First, deep space
rose high and flooded the stage,
immersing all the spots
where our thoughts could have fixed
if our minds had thoughts.
Which they didn’t. Then
the sun came out and stood.
That was all that happened,
and ever would.
-- "The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri
I managed to find a good seat,
and settled in with the others,
who were fanning away the heat
with their programs full of blank pages.
The orchestra was in place,
and soon the show started.
First, deep space
rose high and flooded the stage,
immersing all the spots
where our thoughts could have fixed
if our minds had thoughts.
Which they didn’t. Then
the sun came out and stood.
That was all that happened,
and ever would.
-- "The Day of the Sun" by Vijay Seshadri
Of the Safety Net and Myth
Aug. 21st, 2012 12:00 pmThanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth.
-- Firmin Debrabander at The New York Times
Maybe it is also a myth to believe that society is good or can be, or that people are, or that we are.
-- Firmin Debrabander at The New York Times
Maybe it is also a myth to believe that society is good or can be, or that people are, or that we are.
Of the Safety Net and Myth
Aug. 21st, 2012 12:00 pmThanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth.
-- Firmin Debrabander at The New York Times
Maybe it is also a myth to believe that society is good or can be, or that people are, or that we are.
-- Firmin Debrabander at The New York Times
Maybe it is also a myth to believe that society is good or can be, or that people are, or that we are.
Literary Copyright
Aug. 21st, 2012 06:00 pmAn interesting argument for limiting the copyright of books, one that plays on authorial vanity.
_ _ _
In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from 50 to 70 years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again.
Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendents he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.
-- Tim Parks
_ _ _
In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from 50 to 70 years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again.
Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendents he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.
-- Tim Parks
Literary Copyright
Aug. 21st, 2012 06:00 pmAn interesting argument for limiting the copyright of books, one that plays on authorial vanity.
_ _ _
In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from 50 to 70 years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again.
Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendents he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.
-- Tim Parks
_ _ _
In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from 50 to 70 years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again.
Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendents he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.
-- Tim Parks
Foreign Policy and Fiscal Necessities
Aug. 21st, 2012 09:00 pm“If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
-- Paul Ryan
Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.
_ _ _
NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.
When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.
After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.
In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.
The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.
New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.
Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.
He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”
Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.
Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.
No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.
Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”
Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”
Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”
I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.
Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”
These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.
-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times
-- Paul Ryan
Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.
_ _ _
NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.
When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.
After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.
In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.
The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.
New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.
Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.
He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”
Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.
Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.
No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.
Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”
Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”
Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”
I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.
Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”
These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.
-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times
Foreign Policy and Fiscal Necessities
Aug. 21st, 2012 09:00 pm“If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
-- Paul Ryan
Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.
_ _ _
NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.
When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.
After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.
In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.
The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.
New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.
Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.
He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”
Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.
Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.
No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.
Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”
Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”
Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”
I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.
Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”
These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.
-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times
-- Paul Ryan
Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.
_ _ _
NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.
When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.
After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.
In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.
The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.
New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.
Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”
The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.
He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”
Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.
Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.
No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.
Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”
Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”
Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”
I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.
Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”
These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.
-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times