The novel coronavirus has reminded Americans of something that a mature people should not need to be reminded of: Governments do not get to pick their priorities and preoccupations. Forces and events beyond U.S. shores get a vote, and they might test a Biden administration early and gravely.
Russia is ramshackle and declining: In a 2019 survey, 53 percent of Russians ages 18 to 24 said they wanted to emigrate. Nevertheless, Russia is revising the map of Europe by dismembering its geographically largest nation, Ukraine.
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Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who for 13 months was Trump’s national security adviser, worries that “the overoptimism that animated U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s” produced disappointment that has become a “retrenchment syndrome” and recapitulates the “come home, America” impulse during the nation’s Vietnam agony.
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Robert D. Kaplan of Eurasia Group observes: “Undeniably, our post-Cold War presidents have been dramatically inferior to our Cold War presidents” — Harry Truman through George H.W. Bush — “in terms of thinking strategically about foreign affairs.” Today, during hysterias incubated on campuses, Kaplan warns:
“One should never forget these lines from Solzhenitsyn: ‘Idolized children despise their parents, and when they get a bit older they bully their countrymen.’ . . . Chinese are educated in national pride; increasingly the opposite of what goes on in our own schools and universities.”
A nation that nurtures elites that are at best ambivalent about their nation will not have sufficient confidence to inspire, or deserve, the confidence of other nations. Victoria Nuland, former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, recalls George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram,” in which he said that in opposing the then-emerging Soviet threat “much depends on [the] health and vigor of our own society.”
A mature people, events beyond U.S. shores, optimism, disappointment, Vietnam agony, hysterias, health and vigor of society
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