Exemplary Überpower

  Is there anyone better qualified to write about the vicissitudes of the the Germany-America transatlantic relationship than Josef Joffe?  Educated at Swarthmore and Harvard, Joffe spends most of his time in Washington DC while he also edits and publishes the influential Hamburg weekly Die Zeit.  Now Joffe has come out with a new book about the US: Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America.  The basic thrust of the book is that the United States is today not just a great power, it is something entirely new in history – an Überpower that is stronger that all of its adversaries put together, with a defense budget greater than the combined spending of the rest of the world. Joffe scoffs at the notion that China could threaten US spremacy in the coming decades, Russia is just a shadow of its former power, and the EU is a farce as military force.

And so as the Überpower the United States will always be forced to confront every issue in the world from Darfur to Pyongyang – and in the process become the object of hate and resentment.  Joffe is especially strong when he examines the almost irrational anti-Americanism that is rampant in Europe. Joffe is scathing as he psychoanalyzes the anti-Americanism of his countrymen:

" The second theme is that America is socially retrograde. It is the land of "predatory capitalism" (Raubtierkapitalismus) in the words of the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a country that denies critical social services, like welfare and health insurance, to those who need it most. Coming from behind in the German electoral campaign of 2002, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder resorted (successfully, in the end) to carefully coded anti-Americanism. In a campaign speech in Hanover, he damned America’s ways by praising the superiority of the "German way" (deutscher Weg). "The days are now truly over when America and others were to serve as an example to us. The plundering of little people in the United States, who must now worry about their old-age pensions, while top managers carry home millions and billions after a company bankruptcy, that is not the German way we want for ourselves." Nonetheless, Schrööder’s "Agenda 2010" provided for precisely the kind of welfare cuts mandated by Bill Clinton’s 1996 "workfare" legislation, which would cause seven million people—one-half of all German recipients—to leave the welfare rolls and start working. Apart from the fact that U.S. executives do not make "billions", the point of this tale is the functionality of anti-Americanism in the German domestic political contest. The chancellor denounced the United States while emulating it, setting up the country as a convenient scapegoat (and smokescreen) for the harsh policies he himself enacted. Freud would clap hands over such a vivid instance of projection."  – Josef Joffe Überpower

Joffe doesn’t have any answers to this anti-Americanism: it is simpy the price the nation has to pay for being an Überpower.  Whatever America does in the world, it will be feared, resented, and hated – it’s lonely at the top.  That is our fate, according to Joffe.

But not everyone agrees with Joffe that being hated as an Überpower is our necessary fate.  I want to recommend a new journal – Democracy: A Journal of Ideas – that contains a lot of terrific free content available online (with free registration). The first issue contains an interesting essay by Michael Signer: A City on the Hill.  Signer rejects the failed neoconservatism of the right, as well as the Realpolitik of some of the more moderate Republicans and Democrats.  Instead, he advocates a new foreign policy direction based on Exemplarism.  Here he agrees with Joffe’s analysis of the primacy of the United States as a dominant force:

"In recent years, liberals have underestimated the importance of U.S. primacy, realists have ignored the power of moral idealism, and neoconservatives have scoffed at the necessity of prestige. Exemplarism would chart a course through these shoals, placing the United States in a community, but as its leader. It is a foreign policy for a time when meeting so many of the threats the United States faces requires not only international cooperation, but the cooperation of individuals around the world. And we’ve seen this approach work before–elements of exemplarism can be found in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, Harry S Truman’s Marshall Plan, John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, and Bill Clinton’s Kosovo intervention. The idea of exemplarism is uniquely American–and recognizes America’s singular status–while providing a vision of how a superpower can lead a multipolar world of interdependent nations."

In a way, America’s postwar policy towards Germany could serve as a paradigm for American Exemplarism – since it involved the three pillars of the exemplarist doctrine: morality, power, and prestige:

"That Germany today is a modern liberal democracy can be attributed largely to the careful stewardship of the postwar occupation and de-Nazification program. As a result, during the Cold War West Germans sought to be more liberal and democratic, more like the United States, rather than either a communist or authoritarian country. Germany was part and parcel of the Marshall Plan, which invested billions in rebuilding societies that ultimately would share (if not surpass) most American values; that is exemplarism par excellence.

As Truman once told Henry Kissinger, in response to a question about what he wanted to be remembered for, "We completely defeated our enemies and made them surrender. And then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the community of nations. Only America could have done that." The United States used its moment of triumph not to shame or annihilate its vanquished enemies, but to rebuild them, to show the world the moral quality of its leadership and the rightness of its military might. America’s postwar behavior quickly redounded in its favor–had we treated Japan as a conquered colony, it is unlikely that we would have received such support from the United Nations during the Korean War. Had we followed Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s advice and exacted retribution on Germany by returning it to a pre-industrial pastoral life, we almost certainly would not have been able to build as strong a Western European alliance as we did. "

Would Exemplarism as a foreign policy doctrine overcome the world’s animosity towards the US?  Not completely, for there will always be an element of Nietzschean Ressentiment towards the Überpower.  But a global leadership based on Idealism – instead of military strength – could (re)capture the world’s imagination.