I have been invited to reply to William Thorsell’s farrago of pathologically anti-American nonsense that appeared here in The Hub on May 29 under the title “We don’t have to go along with America’s catastrophic vision of the world forever.” I should write at the outset that I believe I have more reason than almost anyone in this country to have serious reservations about the United States. I do not especially like it as a society; its justice system is so corrupt that it does not, in my opinion, qualify as a society of laws and Canada should not have an extradition treaty with it. Along with its genius of showmanship, from the Declaration of Independence to the Super Bowl, there is almost always a gimcrack element of the country of which, in popular cultural terms, the capital is Hollywood. Its system throws up and often confers undeserved idolatry for a time upon unworthy people.
But we are discussing geopolitical matters and none of that is of the slightest account. The more important facts about the United States are that we owe chiefly to it the great spread of democracy and the market economy in the postwar world. It did the necessary to keep Britain and Canada in the Second World War and President Roosevelt was the chief architect of a strategy by which, as between the big three, the Soviet Union took more than 90 percent of the casualties in subduing Germany and between 1940 and 1945. France, Italy, Germany, and Japan transitioned from being hostile dictatorships, three of them at war with the West, to durable allies of the Anglo-Americans. Meanwhile, the USSR violated treaty obligations and plunged into the Cold War to take secondary strategic assets in Eastern Europe that it had to abandon. The United States strategy of containment led us to victory in the Cold War, without a shot being exchanged between the chief protagonists. The Soviet Union fell like a soufflé.
The United States is not a “hegemon” as Thorsell claims. If it was, it would have absorbed Canada long ago and many other places. All the United States has ever sought in foreign relations is not to be threatened. When it is threatened, it requires the removal of the threat. It has no rival in its own hemisphere, unlike the traditional European great powers where the correlation of forces was more or less equally divided between a number of countries and they had to tolerate each other.
Contrary to what Thorsell writes, the United States has no problem at all with other great powers in the world, as long as they do not threaten it. Like a vintage member of the nostalgic left, he imagines that America is unaware of the rising strength of China and that American capitalist influences are suborning the media and the academies to promote American unipolarity. It pains me to say this about an old and good friend, but a number of assertions in his piece are not entirely sane. He takes seriously Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s statement in Beijing last week that Russia and China will “work toward a more just and democratic…world order,” and promote “cultural and civilizational variety and the measured balance of interests of all members of the international community.”
Thorsell invites us to rely on Russia and China for the promotion of democracy and he imagines that the United States objects to cultural and civilizational variety. He crowns this astonishing triumph of self-brainwashing by requesting the Nobel prize for Vladimir Putin, head of the most overtly aggressive state in the world, who has invaded several of his neighbours and attempted to foment disorder through Russian-speaking minorities in several others.
There is absolutely nothing hegemonic or unacceptable in President Biden’s statement that William cites: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.” The United States will not and great powers do not, and every country should strive to avoid such a condition. The following sentence: “This evangelical fatwa is clearly outrageous and constitutes the primary danger to international peace and security today-from America.” Every word and every letter of every word of that sentence is false and as a formulation it is not sane.
Like a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, William whines that “America is expanding its military bases in the Pacific within just hundreds of miles of the Chinese coast.” He seems not to have noticed that China is violating Taiwanese airspace regularly, is periodically skirmishing with India in the Himalayas, has had border incidents with Vietnam, is making belligerent remarks about many of its neighbours, and claims the entire South China Sea is Chinese territorial waters. He misrepresents the Monroe Doctrine, which has been repealed and was designed to protect Latin American countries from threats from other hemispheres.
Thorsell purports to find a Biden Doctrine, “which sees the entire world as America’s sole sphere of interest.” This is bunk; Biden has been overindulgent of the Russian and Chinese hegemons and Thorsell has the distinction of being the only person in the world who accuses him of being an aggressor. Not even Beijing and Moscow have tried that one. (Nor did President Monroe claim that “the Western Hemisphere was America’s exclusive security and economic zone.” Monroe worked alongside the British to help him assure that neither the Spanish nor anyone else came back to Latin America to snuff out the independence of those countries.)
President Joe Biden arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Thursday, April 25, 2024, in New York. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
Practically every president in the history of the United States has declared the precise opposite of William’s imputation to America today “that anyone not sharing American values is unacceptable.” The reason “America has worked hard recently to line up Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia behind its ‘closed military political alliance’” is that all of them feel threatened by China and have requested American assistance.
Thorsell’s proposed response to that is to dismiss all of them and give Beijing a blank cheque to take what it wants and intimidate whomever it wishes. China is not remotely as powerful a country as the United States, it has a 40 percent command economy. completely corrupt institutions, is a totalitarian state and is poor with very limited resources.
But it is a challenge and like all countries and all people the United States tends to rise to a challenge. Its activities and alliances are entirely defensive. The “military-industrial complex” President Eisenhower warned about and “corrupt financial political system” do not in the slightest reduce America’s toleration of other countries.
No political faction in America wishes to police the world. American intellectuals are indeed guilty of a form of treason, but it is a Thorsellian hostility to America which is their offense. For all its failings, it is undoubtedly the greatest country in the history of the world, the most benign leading power in the history of the world. There has never, in the history of the world, been anything remotely like the rise of America from three million colonists to half the economic product of the entire war-ravaged world, and an atomic monopoly in two long lifetimes: from the American Revolution to the end of the Second World War. For over a century, it has operated on a scale that the world never imagined to be possible. Those who threaten it have an unfortunate history.
The United States did not sink neutral civilian shipping in First World War, it did not attack Pearl Harbor, it did not try to extinguish South Korea or South Vietnam, it has not invaded Ukraine or Israel, and is not threatening Taiwan or attempting to exterminate the Uighurs. Nor is it an emasculated despotism like Russia with a GDP smaller than Canada’s.
Conrad Black is a historian, author, columnist, financier, and justice reform advocate.
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