Leadership? Have Some Exceptionalism Instead
George Packer tries to look ahead, only to find himself staring at America.
George Packer cannot get over having once been for the invasion of Iraq. I don’t blame him, exactly; I’ve hardly got over once being for the endeavour myself. But Packer’s is an important voice. His book on the American occupation and early counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, The Assassin’s Gate, was a glimmering journalistic achievement. His growing disillusion with previous liberal interventionist convictions only made the writing better.
It ought to be interesting, then, to read his essay in this month’s issue of the Atlantic on the state of American exceptionalism. After all the rules-based world order, imposed largely by the West after crushing the revanchist rebellions of Germany, Japan and Italy (the Russia, China and Iran of its day), is under unprecedented assault. Surely Packer, as a reformed Neoconservative with regrets aplenty, must have some juicy insights on offer.
Or so one would hope. Well, it begins solidly enough, with Packer picking apart the arguments of each and every isolationist strain in US public debate – from the far left to the nervous middle to the fascist right. Any regular reader of this Substack would, I’m sure, agree with his verdicts.
Somewhere along the way, however, Packer gets bogged down in the very same mud he accuses the isolationists of slinging: refusing to give real agency to any other nation than the United States. All that matters now, it seems, is that America continues to lead ‘by example’ (which would include, he states somewhat superfluously, not reelecting Donald Trump).
No matter that countless US military leaders have expressed their astonishment at Ukraine’s battlefield successes, as well as their conviction that all NATO member states have a lot to learn from Ukraine when it comes to fighting a full-scale, modern war. In Packer’s view, the war – which by any estimate has cost Ukraine tens of thousands of dead and wounded – is all about American leadership. The Biden Doctrine, Packer’s name for US national security advisor Jack Sullivan’s perpetual fear of ‘escalation’, is what gets the job done. Or so Packer would have us believe.
Perhaps we need to tread carefully through terrain like this: the trope of American willingness to fight the Russians “to the last Ukrainian” is a fixture of Russian fascist propaganda, often repeated by Putin’s stooges in the West. But enough is enough. The only nation on earth standing between European liberty and Russian barbarism just entered its second winter of fighting for its people’s right to exist. The least we can do is try to remember both the price being paid, and who are in fact paying it.
‘I pay in blood, but not my own’, Bob Dylan notes, his voice dry with self-loathing. In the cold months ahead, we would all do well to reflect on that sentiment.
That's a very good comment on Packer's essay. Still, there is a chance that US is pulling most of the strings (although UA is doing the hard work). Sometimes it seems US is supplying just enough weapons to help UA wear RU down. Rust. Hoping for 1917. Not more, because that could escalate things.