When I call it myth, I don't mean it's a lie. I mean it's a foundational narrative of American power that expresses our most basic assumptions about the world, a story in which every nation on the planet is, theoretically, ours to lose.
To most Americans (though not to much of the rest of the world), this narrative does not reflect sheer hubris and intoxication with imperial power. It's just good common sense. Throughout our history, at the heart of the dominant national mythology has been the assumption that the U.S. should be the world's "locomotive" and all the other nations "the caboose" (as President Harry Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, once said). The reason for this was simple (at least to Americans): we were the first and greatest nation founded on the universal moral truths that are supposedly self-evident to any reasonable person.
Sure, controlling the world would serve our self-interest in all sorts of tangible ways. However, our primary self-interest, so the myth maintains, always was and always will be the moral improvement -- perhaps even perfection -- of the entire world. By serving ourselves we serve all humanity.
The Fiercest Political Battle of All
The only question worth debating, then, is how we can use our preponderant power and wealth most shrewdly to maintain effective control. Most Americans expect their president to know the answer. At the same time, most Americans worry that he might not. A more recent pillar of the bipartisan narrative, the myth of homeland insecurity, suggests the opposite.
According to that myth, no matter how much military strength we have or control we exert, there is always "a rising tide of tumult" somewhere that threatens our national security. At every moment, somewhere in the world, we have something crucial to lose. The name of the threat can change with surprising ease. But the peril must always be there. It's essential to the story.
And that story, in turn, is now essential to every presidential contest. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once wrote, "Every election has the same narrative: Can the strong father protect the house from invaders?" (Think of Ronald Reagan and the Iran captivity tale or George W. Bush and 9/11.) If one candidate is the incumbent, the question becomes: Has he been a strong enough father to control the world and thereby protect the house?
Every challenger plays on that anxiety, picking the most obvious or convenient example of the day as a hook on which to hang the perennial charges of weakness and peril. Since the "Who lost China?" days, Republicans have played this card especially skillfully.
This year it seemed that a Democrat who "surged" in Afghanistan, killed bin Laden, and personally ran a drone assassination campaign from the White House had, for once, successfully protected his right flank against the predictable GOP attack. Then fate sent the Libyan killings to the Romney campaign, the newsrooms, and a big portion of the American public. Give Romney's people credit: they sensed the opportunity from day one.
Mitt had to demand "Who lost Libya?" and then transform it into "Who lost the Middle East?" -- not merely to boost his chances but because a big slice of the public yearns for such a "debate." After all, every time the question of "Who lost [fill in the blank]?" arises, it reaffirms both the reassuring promise that we deserve to control the world and the disturbing anxiety that we might lose what is rightly ours.
What was, for all its tragic dimensions, a minor event in Libya became a central campaign issue because it proved to be this season's code word for the whole mythological package. For many Americans, the deepest reassurance may come simply from sensing that our traditional mythology -- the familiar lens through which we view our nation and its role in the world -- is still intact.
On the horizon, though, we can dimly see a new question rising: How much longer can this mythology survive? It suffered a major wound in the Vietnam War era, when the fantasy of global control was rudely punctured by reality. That wound has been ripped open again by fruitless wars and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Now, there are so many unsettling changes around the world that we can't predict, much less control, them. Soon enough -- perhaps by 2020, or even 2016 -- the political battle cry may be: "Who lost the world?"
It's even possible to imagine that someday Americans will engage in the debate we really need -- about choosing a new paradigm for foreign policy that fits today's world, where the fantasy of global control has become irrelevant because the facts so obviously contradict it, as American power declines while other nations steadily gain strength.
Don't expect the old mythology to disappear quietly, though. Old myth versus new myth is the fiercest political battle of all.
