American foreign-policy analysts are divided these days into two camps: those who believe the United States is a twilight power, and those who think that the only threat to America鈥檚 superpower status comes from a self-induced crisis of confidence, brought about by wimps in high places who are steering us toward decline. President Barack Obama appears to be in the first camp, and there鈥檚 an argument to be made that he鈥檚 right.
One way to understand Obama鈥檚 presidency is as the stewardship of a leader who must subtly make his countrymen confront a fact they would prefer to avoid鈥攏amely, that the age of American prosperity is over. From that perspective, passing healthcare legislation was all-important to his presidency because without the economic boom of the post-World War II era, the state is now being forced to care for its aging population by dividing up a shrinking pie. As for Obama鈥檚 foreign policy, it is not a matter of making the United States appear to behave in a more modest and polite fashion after eight years of George W. Bush鈥檚 stubborn unilateralism. Rather, reality itself has humbled us.
But if the American century is coming to an end, it鈥檚 not just on account of Bush鈥檚 failures or the worldwide economic crisis, but because of a larger historical divide that we have barely begun to fathom鈥攖he end of the Cold War.鈥淭here was a balance of terror during the Cold War that people didn鈥檛 acknowledge,鈥� Marc Weitzmann, a French journalist, literary critic, and novelist, told me recently in Paris. 鈥淭he violence of the Cold War was sent to the Third World. These conflicts existed in faraway areas, places that we didn鈥檛 care about, like the Middle East. Now they鈥檙e fought out everywhere. As it turned out, the Berlin Wall wasn鈥檛 between East and West Germany, it was protecting the citizens of the West from violence.鈥�
Weitzmann and I were having lunch near his apartment, at the Hotel du Nord, a quiet restaurant on the site of the 1938 Marcel Carn茅 movie of the same name. A short, powerfully built 51-year-old man with a shock of red hair and intense blue eyes, Weitzmann speaks English with the fluid wit and mania of a New Yorker. He splits his time between Paris and New York, where he鈥檚 become close to writers like Philip Roth and Paul Berman. Weitzmann and I first met more than a decade ago, when he was still safely in the mainstream of Parisian literary culture and writing regular book reviews for Les Inrockuptibles, a leftist weekly that resembles a combination of Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. In the aftershocks of Sept. 11, Weitzmann鈥檚 former colleagues came to consider his qualified support of Bush, the war in Iraq, and Israel heretical. His intellectual re-orientation began when Weitzmann moved to Israel to write a book about the recent massive Russian migration, the post-Cold War world, and globalization. The end of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada caught him by surprise, and he started to investigate his Jewish roots, a legacy that was largely obscured by his parents鈥� communist convictions. It is perhaps partly his family history that makes him especially sensitive to the significance of the Cold War, a conflict fought on four continents between two nuclear superpowers for nearly half a century.
The Cold War is again drawing attention from the French intelligentsia, with articles recently featured on the covers of news magazines and intellectual journals. This indicated that France is among the first countries to wake to the fact that it is not a post-Sept. 11 world but one still shaped by the Cold War and its conclusion, an aftermath that we have yet to account for properly. The spectacular nature of Sept. 11 and the consequences of those attacks obscured the remarkable fact that a war that had so profoundly shaped the modern world had only recently come to an end.
If Germany was the Cold War鈥檚 strategic battlefield, Weitzmann told me, then France was its 鈥渋deological battleground,鈥� which makes his home country an ideal perch from which to understand the reality we inhabit now. A case in point is the part former President Jacques Chirac鈥檚 France played in opposing the Iraq war.
鈥淭here was anti-Americanism on top of it,鈥� said Weitzmann, 鈥渂ut the French just wanted peace restored, and peace of mind. But they never understood that during the Cold War things were never that stable to begin with. The Cold War was a great time for Europe, especially France. There was stability and prosperity, and it was all protected by the Americans, and Europe didn鈥檛 even know it. This schizophrenia was possible as long as the Cold War went on, but as soon as it was over, the contradictions appeared. The French were afraid of the new context, so they hung on to what they knew in order to explain it: The U.S. was evil, and the Jews were manipulating things.鈥�
Weitzmann鈥檚 new novel, Quand J鈥橢tais Normal, or When I Was Normal, is about the insecure political context that has beset post-Cold War France. Set in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war, when Paris was sharply divided between pro-war and anti-war camps, it is the story of a French Jewish family鈥斺渁 chaotic family,鈥� according to Weitzmann鈥攎uddling through a landscape of political chaos, paranoia, and Jewish anxiety and insecurity.
鈥淭he anti-war demonstrations were composed of Chirac supporters, leftists, and Muslims,鈥� Weitzmann said. 鈥淎nd the pro-war demonstrators were basically Jews. The Jews were scared of the climate in France, and for good reason: These anti-war demonstrators were openly anti-Semitic. Along with images of Chirac, you had Hamas songs. There are both 5 million Muslims in France and also the biggest Jewish community in Europe today.鈥�
Weizmann says that anti-Israel rhetoric has largely disappeared from French political discourse even if anti-Israel sentiment hasn鈥檛 changed much. In contrast to the Chirac years, said Weitzmann, 鈥渨ith Sarkozy there is no link between popular resentment toward Israel and the official government position.鈥� But hostility toward the United States has different roots, which the election of Obama did little to quell. 鈥淭he fact that a black man is president impresses Europeans for the wrong reasons,鈥� Weitzmann said. 鈥淭hey see Obama鈥檚 election as a victory for Third Worldism. In the end, his election was a message from America to Americans, not to the world.鈥�
The United States, Weitzmann argues, are no longer capable of playing the role of world leader because the world itself has changed. 鈥淐oming out of World War II,鈥� Weitzmann said, 鈥渢he American idea was that the U.S. is the only country capable of fighting terror regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. Europe needed to be rebuilt, and the U.S. was the only free country able to lead the way. The legitimacy of that leadership depends on the fiction that there is indeed a Western world to be led.鈥�
Weitzmann explains that by fiction he doesn鈥檛 mean that the idea is false, only that every identity is created, and this is how America鈥檚 postwar identity came about. 鈥淭he idea that there is such a thing as the West is how the U.S. legitimized its leadership.鈥�
In other words, the real challenge to American leadership is not the economy or even the desire of some U.S. policymakers to reduce our international profile but a lack of legitimacy. 鈥淲orld War II was the moment that the idea of what America was and the reality coincided,鈥� Weitzmann said. 鈥淵ou liberated the camps, you beat the Nazis, and so on. But now the landscape is different. Now what you think you are is in conflict with what others think of you.鈥�
The question then is not just whether the United States is capable of leading but whether anyone is interested in or capable of following. Western Europe is scaling down its global commitments. France and Britain are planning to share aircraft carriers, as their economies won鈥檛 permit them to operate independent modern navies. 鈥淓urope is trying to exist without military power,鈥� Weitzmann said, 鈥渂ut there is no economic power without military grounding.鈥� The irony is that a U.S. victory in the Cold War revealed Europe鈥檚 impotency. 鈥淏ush鈥檚 big mistake,鈥� Weitzmann argued, 鈥渨as that he did not understand that if Europe is militarily impotent, if Europe is effectively dead, then the U.S. has lost its legitimacy to lead the West.鈥�
It鈥檚 worth remembering that French intellectuals condemned the naivet茅 and imperial greed of our political classes for almost 50 years after the end of World War II and, as Weitzmann said, ignored the fact that their freedoms were ensured by American economic and military might. If Weitzmann鈥檚 frightening thesis is correct that there is no longer a West for the United States to lead, it鈥檚 a concern that was shared by members of the Bush Administration. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between Old Europe, which included France, and New Europe, the Central and Eastern European states once behind the Iron Curtain. In the wake of the Cold War, New Europe still looks to Washington for leadership. Whether we鈥檙e capable of leading there and elsewhere, like the Muslim Middle East, remains to be seen.
In the end, though, the American century was never about history, or the notion that it was simply our turn in the great historical cycle. Rather, we are self-generated, self-willed, born of the desire to recreate ourselves. We took that privilege and responsibility upon ourselves. It is difficult to imagine what the United States is without the idea that we bear a great responsibility for the fate of others and are willing to lead.