A brutal conclusion to Adam Gopnik's profile of Nicolas Sarkozy:
The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal...Now, for the first time, it's possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.
What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era.
It's an interesting thought. In the 1990s, the formulation was that we were the "indispensable nation." The question, increasingly, is indispensable for what? A land war with China, certainly, but no one's jumping into that. A reduction in carbon emissions, but we don't appear interested in cooperating. Our funding for various developmental projects is important, but not indispensable in the sense that it grants us prestige or unquestioned leadership. Our involvement in various international organizations and treaties -- the International Criminal Court, the UN, the Non-Proliferation treaty -- legitimizes them, but we've pulled away or sought to undermine these institutions and they've survived despite our efforts. Our recent invasion continues to prove an unmitigated disaster, we've lost our prestige and proven unable to bring Iran to heel, and Latin America is now populated with leaders who found political success in anti-Americanism.
It's not a good time for America.
