The U.S. & the World
Thinking about our role post-post-9/11.

February 13, 2002 12:15 p.m.

hirty years ago terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. That terrible week, I happened to be at a meeting of free-market economists and philosophers on Lake Geneva. The morning after the massacre, the chairman of the meeting announced that in response to requests from several members, our proceedings would begin with a minute's silence in memory of the murdered sportsmen.

Usually such requests go through on the nod. On this occasion, however, there was an objection. Enoch Powell, a leading British conservative politician of the day, argued that there was no reason for a meeting of economists to single out for mourning one event from all the tragedies and atrocities disfiguring the world — and he cited several from that day's papers. If we had been meeting in Germany where the murders had taken place, he could understand and support such a mark of respect and sympathy. But we were in Switzerland. We should simply continue with the society's business.

A passionate debate ensued. A motion to observe a minute's silence was passed by a majority that was substantial but not unanimous. It was held. And the meeting continued — not, however, without bruised feelings on all sides.

One of those present was the great philosopher of classical liberalism (and member of Chicago University's Committee on Social Thought), F. A. Hayek, who a few years later told a British journalist that it had changed his high opinion of Powell in one respect. Powell had been technically correct in his objections to the moment's silence. He was entitled to raise them. Still, his raising those objections to a simple mark of respect requested by many present showed him to be unbalanced, excessively logical, and unable to distinguish between greater and lesser matters.

Some lessons from this incident can be applied to the controversy over the International Olympic Committee's initial objections to the carrying of the tattered Stars and Stripes, rescued from Ground Zero, by the U.S. athletic delegation at the opening of the games. Technically the IOC was correct: The Olympic Games are an international sporting event. They are designed to rise above all political questions — even such non-controversial positions as opposition to terrorism — and to give equal time to all nations, not to single out one nation for particular attention.

As the IOC itself soon realized, however, to have employed these arguments to insist on banning the World Trade Center standard would have been excessively logical and unbalanced. America has both suffered a great blow and achieved a great victory; its tattered flag signified the nation's steadiness under fire; and its position at the head of the U.S. delegation was a splendid mark of defiance that took the enemy's apparently successful strike and entirely reversed its meaning — like the small British expeditionary force that landed in France in 1914 adopting the Kaiser's dismissal of them as "contemptible" and referring to themselves thereafter as the "Old Contemptibles."

Finally, as Enoch Powell had conceded in principle 30 years before, the fact that the Games were being held on American soil made a difference. It gave all the nations represented a chance to express their solidarity with the U.S. by standing aside for a moment and giving the Stars and Stripes a special pre-eminence. For all these reasons the IOC was right to give way.

Yet the lack of balance was not all on one side. The reaction of Americans — as best it can be gauged through the prism of the U.S. media — was too indignant. It did not take into account the IOC's necessary concern for Olympic traditions. And it was too querulous, combative, and even self-pitying.

Indeed, as September 11 recedes into the past, the initial popular reaction of somber and dignified patriotism has been gradually infected by, and mixed with, lesser emotions — in particular, a shriller nationalism that either complains or boasts constantly that the U.S. has been deserted by its friends and allies and has to act alone against terrorism.

As an account of recent reality, this is false. American special forces in Afghanistan were assisted not only by the Northern Alliance but also by the special forces of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Not entirely coincidentally, these same nations also formed the military committee that planned the intervention to restore order and establish the conditions for civil democracy in East Timor (in which Australia played the main role on the ground.) And the armed forces of the English-speaking world frequently intervene in unison, partly because they are better able to communicate and cooperate with each other technically, and partly because they see the world in roughly the same way.

Continental "Europeans" played a more subsidiary role — but mainly because their armed forces were ill-equipped and because the U.S. could find only secondary tasks for them. France, Germany, Italy, and others volunteered all the same — and as you read this, 1,800 Germans are sailing off the African coast to be ready to assist U.S. action in Somalia. The failure of European nations has been in their allocating small amounts of their budgets to defense, not in refusing to allocate troops to help in Afghanistan.

It is true that some European nations are genetically indisposed to give the U.S. military support, usually the Belgians but on some occasions the French. That is good reason for the U.S. to resist the kind of common European foreign and defense policy that would give them and similarly minded nations a veto over military action by nations like Germany and Britain. At present, however, the U.S. encourages such integration while
muttering under its breath about the "unhelpful" Europeans.

And since September 11 a third tier of support has been available to the U.S. in the form of Russia and its remaining client states. U.S. troops have been operating out of bases in the formerly Soviet central Asian "stans" — an impossible dream even a few months ago. The U.S. is obliged to listen to some advice it may not like in return for these various levels of assistance. But it is not obliged to take that advice. And on the whole it seems a modest price to pay for help — even if on this occasion much of the help was more symbolic than useful.

In addition to being false, the notion of America as an isolated Atlas also fosters bad policy. The U.S. is the only superpower. But it does not possess limitless resources. In the unforeseeable struggles that lie ahead, it will need allies on occasion — allies who will sometimes disagree with the U.S. president's approach (though rarely more so than the Democratic party.) We would do well to express gratitude for their help and to treat their occasional disagreements as legitimate. To indulge in a sulky unilateralism would be unbalanced, not particularly logical and a case of that febrile macho boasting that a critic of Hemingway once summed up as "false hair on the chest."