Dalton Delan: Isolationism leaves us asleep at the wheel on a rocky road
We are asleep at the wheel — a very dangerous place to be. It haunts my dreams.
Recently, I awakened from arguing with a university professor over his failure to condemn violence in Palestine. I scratched my head over this imagined debate and realized it doesn’t mean as much anymore, which is part of its tragedy as well as a counterintuitive outgrowth of the 1993 peace accords. For good or ill, take it as you will, the end of the world isn’t detonating in Ramallah. As dreams often do, that seemed to be the point: to remind me by indirection.
What does matter, then? In a world consumed by navel-gazing over the ever-evolving pandemic, our all-too-American self-absorption has risen to a new low, limbo style. Not since our blind eye of the 1930s have we turned so inward in our concerns, oblivious to those who are making hay while we sleep. Xi Jinping builds up sand in the South China Sea while reducing to rubble the last bits of freedom in Hong Kong, as Taiwan bites its fingernails and waits.
Cross the Altai Mountains to Russia, and vodka is flowing in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin has tested two successive U.S. presidents and found them wanting. Only time will reveal whether Donald Trump was really a Manchurian Candidate or just an isolationist fool having a bromance with dictators. That was so yesterday. Today, we have the specter of his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden, who, more than just bidin’ his time, has fully demonstrated with the collapse in Kabul that he wants no part of what he perceives as other peoples’ problems. Or are they?
The problem with sticking one’s head in the sand is that it shifts, and a rising tide of territorial aggression can drown the unwary. In the Ukraine, wary citizens train for armed resistance that starts to feel inevitable as Putin’s armies mass at the border.
It begins to feel like Poland in 1939. Two years after, America joined the war thanks to Pearl Harbor. We had warmed the bench as long as we could get away with it. We turned away Jewish refugees.
Under cover of the pandemic, there are those who aspire to improve their nation’s lot by a land-grab that would have been unthinkable even under Barack Obama who, for all his customary cool, hunted down Osama bin Laden and dispensed drone strikes like Pez candies. A reluctant warrior, he nevertheless chose his battles and stayed the course, aware that a smaller fight might deter a larger one. If one risks nothing, then neighborhood bullies stake their claims. One doesn’t need to be the world’s policeman. But stability today rests on interdependence. Surely supply-chain disruptions and the viral tornado borne by the ill winds from Wuhan have taught us that.
Yet it appears that they haven’t. It’s a perfect time for those who have not abandoned nation-building to make their moves. We have a caretaker-in-chief, and come 2024 we may see Trump back in power. Either way, the pandemic provides ample cover for disasters-in-the-making in the Pacific and Eastern Europe. Will Putin and Xi know when to stop, or will they push past their borders and press for an endgame against those they deem weak?
I begin to understand my disrupted sleep. What chain of events will bear us to the brink of the kind of confrontation we faced in Cuba? Is there anyone with John F. Kennedy’s stiff spine, or is the osteoporosis of our leaders such that we are rendered invertebrate? Dialing back the years, we associate “peace at any price” with the puppet of appeasement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, but it was actually our own Teddy Roosevelt who warned of this fallacy in 1917.
The Rough Rider was out of office, but not unconcerned with our reluctance to enter World War I. Teddy wrote searingly: “Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood — the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.” A century later, his admonition rings like newly minted coins. He penned these words a year before the 1918 flu pandemic swept the world. It is as if we are in a black hole, having learned nothing. We are snoring toward Bethlehem.
You don’t have to be a hawk to recognize other raptors. The domino theory led to washing France’s dirty laundry in Vietnam, as our neocolonial concept of communist containment became a precursor to succeeding Russia in the sand trap of Afghanistan. Having cut and run, we’re back where we were before two world wars. Sleep brings dreams, but some are real nightmares. With Neville brothers inhabiting 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., two sides of the same coin, I sleep like an owl.
