RIDGEWAY, COLORADO — A Merrill Lyncher with good timing cashed out a while back and bought himself a modest cabin with breathtaking views of the aspen and pine forests rising toward the jagged peaks of the Rockies. The American West, empty enough in these parts, still holds something of the limitless promise of a virgin land.
Roger Cohen
Some time later, a former colleague who had labored on and amassed a far greater fortune — as well as greater cares — came to visit and the two men went for a stroll. The cabin owner, by now a ruddy-faced Mr. Mellow, gestured toward the snow-covered ridge and said: “The difference between us is you have everything money can buy and I have everything money can’t buy.”
When it comes to money, timing is everything. When it comes to life, it helps to have what the British explorer Richard Burton called “the wanderer’s heart.”
The United States, like some heavyweight who’s taken one punch too many, is still groggy from the money fever of gutted pension funds, toxic securities and lunatic leverage. My sense is the world, like Merrill Lynch, was about three nanoseconds from complete meltdown.
That’s been averted. But Americans are in a different mental place. They’re paying down debt. They’re not hiring. They’ve gotten reacquainted with risk. They’re going to have to survive without Gourmet magazine.
The cabin in the woods is looking good after the era of the starter mansion. America hates scaling back. Its nature, hard-wired to the new frontier, is alien to retraction. But that’s the zeitgeist President Barack Obama has inherited. The challenge he faces is how to manage reduced expectations.
In the vastness of southern Colorado, where mountain and mesa and meadow summon archetypal images of American possibility — and wasn’t Obama’s election precisely about restoring the mythology of that possibility? — I found myself pondering this tension between the idealism projected onto the president and the realism that is his obligation: the tension between America’s exalted self-image and its current quandary.
The beautiful wild put me in mind of Gatsby: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
But Obama is talking down wonderment. In so doing, I suspect, he’s setting the tone for coming decades that — whatever else they bring — will see America’s relative economic power decline.
His words last month at the United Nations were important: “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone. We have sought — in word and deed — a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Far more than an all-powerful America, Obama sees the constraints of interconnection.
This is a relatively new language for an American president. The notion of the United States as an exceptional power, a beacon for mankind, has resided at the core of the heroic American narrative. From Lincoln through Wilson to Reagan and Bush, the lexicon of American-inspired redemption has been recurrent. American exceptionalism has involved a messianic streak, the belief in a country with a global calling to uplift.
Obama represents a departure from this tradition. Tom Paine said, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” The president avoids such resounding exhortations. He even steers clear of the Clinton-era characterization of the United States as “the indispensable nation.”
To the contrary, Obama admits American failings. He does not quite say America is just one nation among many, but he’s unequivocal about the fact that America can’t solve the world’s problems alone or in its image.
He announced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in this way: “What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries.”
He said Iraq should be “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a government that is “just, representative and accountable.” Note the absent words here, quintessential expressions of U.S. ideals: liberty, freedom, democracy. Obama has no illusions about the exportability of democracy.
All this suggests to me that, as he manages expectations downward, Obama will be no more seduced by “the pursuit of the perfect” in Afghanistan than he was in Iraq. I suspect he’ll punt for now on the agonizing question of sending more troops, neither rejecting the military’s requests out of hand, nor making a sizeable commitment. We won’t be hearing too much from the president about Afghan democracy.
America, forced by circumstance, is cashing out. It’s changing perspective, adjusting to a 21st-century world of new power centers. Obama’s new discourse was needed. But unless he can embody possibility in retrenchment — “everything money can’t buy” — I doubt he can carry the country with him.
As of next week, Roger Cohen's “Globalist” column will appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
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