ANOTHER VOICE
As America withdraws, Britain may grow up again
AUBERON WAUGH
Athough composed a few days before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, this piece is written in the assumption that my own candidate for the Republican nomina- tion, Pat Buchanan, will not have won, even if he is not yet set to disappear from the political scene. If that has indeed been the outcome, and if it now looks as if George Bush may yet be allowed to limp into a sec- ond, disastrous term, then it will be despite the fact that Buchanan has been expressing precisely what most Americans of left, right and centre now believe: that it is time for the government to put America first; to bring Our Boys home; to cut down on for- eign aid and world policing, and solve its own economic problems before taking on the burdens of the whole world.
The reason Buchanan will have failed to prevail in the vote, despite encapsulating what nearly every American fervently desires, will have been that he came up against two important American trigger words — 'protectionism' and 'isolationism'. Americans have been brought up to identi- fy these two words as Bad. Never mind that everything they think, say or believe at the present time leads to protectionism and, by one remove, to isolationism. Even the stupidest American has had it drummed into him that protectionism is Bad, that the wealth of the United States is founded on free trade and competition. Few Americans are more capable of making the conceptual leap when confronted by such a trigger word as Protectionism, from 'Protection- ism=Bad' to 'Protectionism= Good' than they would be able to entertain the propo- sitions: 'Democratic =bad'; 'Undemocrat- ic=good'.
Whether this demonstrates firm moral purpose among the Americans or just a certain lack of intellectual agility, I imagine it means that President Bush (or some Democrat unknown) will be left with the job of implementing Buchanan's policies while maintaining the idealistic rhetoric of a New World Order, or Great Society, or whatever. In America it may be dangerous to express strong views of any description — they will inevitably lead to charges of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, etc., whatev- er they are — but it is noticeable that what- ever needs doing generally gets done.
And however much we may mock the Americans for their lack of intellectual agility, I have seen little sign that anybody in Europe has made a serious attempt to think through the consequences of the evil empire's collapse. It was an evil empire — I do not know why all the simpletons of Eng- land chose to snigger when President Rea- gan called it that — and the United States, under President Reagan, has defeated it. If its removal has left the gigantic American military machine without any apparent pur- pose, it has also left Europe with no need for an American military presence in its midst. One sees the workings of the arms industry lobby in both continents frenziedly assuring us that a future without Nato is unthinkable, that the military threat from Libya and Iran grows daily, soon to be joined by any number of maverick Islamic nuclear republics; Pakistan is apparently the one closest to everybody's mind.
The most ludicrous manifestation of the argument is in Mr Yeltsin's proposal warmly backed by Mr Henry Cooper, direc- tor of America's Star Wars programme for a Russo-American missile shield in space protecting the whole world from bal- listic nuclear attack. In this way, the Rus- sian nuclear weapons industry could be kept going, at America's expense — but to protect whom against whom? There is no Third World country (including China) which could not be kept in good order, at any rate so far as nuclear threat is con- cerned, by a pair of Trident submarines.
If the arms industry requires an evil empire to oppose, so, I suspect, does some- thing within the political psychology of many countries, including our own. But few people in Europe have come to terms with the fact that America is now the only super- power and one without an enemy to justify the enormous expense of supporting the role. In a thoughtful article in the Sunday Telegraph recently, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne suggested that Japan might fill the part of evil empire in America's imagi- nation, at the same time as he spotted a special relationship building up between Britain and Japan: 'Perhaps the two island races have more in common than they `Canned laughter?'
realised,' wrote that saintly man. 'Both are a bit reserved, old-fashioned, status-con- scious, formal.' Bless him, but these are the furthest reaches of manic Europhobia. I yield to no one in my admiration of the Japanese for exactly the qualities he describes, but does he really suppose that modern Britain possesses them?
I feel we should welcome America's with- drawal from the world scene as betokening a general deglobalisation. Russia and the new Republics should be left to sort out their problems. Let us hope that Russia does not decide to sell fully equipped nuclear submarines to Iran or Libya. We, for our part, must learn to become mem- bers of the European Community. The best thing for America to do with its excess pub- lic capacity is to devote it to the great American health anxiety: ozone depletion, global warming and the rest of that rubbish.
Already Nasa, taking the hint, has started' issuing warnings of ozone reduction in the northern hemisphere. In the south, a study group has found an increasing number of sheep in Punta Arenas, Chile, suffering from cataracts. Hunters have found blind rabbits. There are reports of wild guanocos (llama-like creatures) giving birth three months later than normal. True, there has as yet been no increase in the incidence of human skin cancer, but $500 billion a year is not too much to spend if you would rather be safe than sorry, as most Ameri- cans would agree where their health is con- cerned.
My own reason for welcoming an Ameri- can withdrawal into isolationism is not commercial nor even medical — despite constant demands for quarantine regula- tions, I believe the Aids risk to be much exaggerated — but cultural. Perhaps I have written enough about this. Watching televi- sion — something I rarely do — in the Suf- folk health farm where I am entombed, I discovered once that all four channels car- ried American programmes and American voices. Of all the things which America has to offer the world, its television is the worst. Why do we buy it? At other times, what I thought to be lower-class English voices turned out to be Australian. We seem unable to contemplate our own class-dam- aged society. If we are not prepared to take an interest in ourselves, we may be sure that nobody else is. But first we must try to rid ourselves of this fawning cultural dependence on the Americans.
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