The Great and All Powerful United States

Yesterday I appeared on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss Niall Ferguson’s latest book, which argues that the West in general and the United States in particular is losing its mojo. 

The theme of Western decline was still running through my head as I perused the New York Times website this AM.  In his Damascus dispatch today, Neil MacFarquhar dutifully details the Syrian government’s position on the cause of the sustained unpleasantness in the country:

Rather than responding to the motivations and demands behind the antigovernment uprising, opponents and political analysts say, the government has stubbornly clung to the narrative that it is besieged by a foreign plot….

Senior government officials — including Mr. Assad — and their supporters reel off a strikingly uniform explanation for the uprisings, blaming foreign agents and denying official responsibility for the violence.

“Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa,” Mr. Assad said in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday. In the interview, Mr. Assad denied ordering a crackdown. “We don’t kill our people,” he said. “No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

Virtually no one in the Syrian government links the uprisings to the sentiment inspiring revolutions across the Arab world, to a public fed up with the status quo. Instead, they say the United States and Israel, allied with certain quisling Arab governments, are plotting to destroy Syria, to silence its lone, independent Arab voice and to weaken its regional ally, Iran. To achieve this aim, they are arming and financing Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries who enter Syria from abroad, Syrian officials say.

“Syria is one of the last secular regimes in the Arab world, and they are targeting Syria,” said Buthaina Shaaban, a presidential political and media adviser, warning that the West would rue the day that it enabled Islamist regimes.

And then I read David Herszenhorn’s update on Vladimir Putin’s thinking on the causes behind Russian protests earlier this week:

With opposition groups still furious over parliamentary elections that international observers said were marred by cheating, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of instigating protests by baselessly criticizing the vote as “dishonest and unfair” and he warned that Russia needed to protect against “interference” by foreign governments in its internal affairs.

“I looked at the first reaction of our U.S. partners,” Mr. Putin said in remarks to political allies. “The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.”

“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”

Mr. Putin’s assertions of foreign meddling and his vow to protect Russian “sovereignty” came after three days in which the Russian authorities have moved forcefully to tamp down on efforts to protest the elections, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and deploying legions of pro-Kremlin young people in Moscow to occupy public squares and to chant, beat drums and drown out the opposition.

Wow, I had no idea that the United States was this powerful!!  Hillary Clinton is apparently capable of getting thousands of Russians in the streets with just a few sentences. 

Now clearly, actual American influence over events in Russia and Syria is pretty limited.  Still, if the perception of power is a form of power in and of itself, I wonder if the Secretary of State — perhaps after consuming too much egg nog at the State Department holiday reception — would be tempted to give the following address to the diplomatic press corps: 

I’d like to take this oppportunity today to admit that the United States, is, in fact, responsible for the nine-month uprising in Syria and the recent unrest in Russia.  Oh, hell, who am I kidding — we’re responsible for the entire Arab Spring!  It’s true, the whole thing started about a year ago, at the Policy Planning Staff’s Secret Santa party.  One of them said, "hey, you know what would really advance American interests in the Middle East?  If we destabilized secular authoritarian despots and empowered Islamist parties across the region!  Those parties would really be more likely to back American policies in the region!  Oh, and we should start with Egypt too, because of their peace treaty with Israel."  

That initiative was sooooo successful that, again, my Foreign Service Officers came up with the brilliant concept of instigating the Occupy Wall Street movement, so we could demonstrate a template for how protests should naturally germinate in other countries.  Did you like how some of the policy forces overreacted to those movements?  Yeah, that was the State Department’s idea too.  We were hoping to encourage authoritarian leaders to overreact and crack down — because without our inspiration, they would never have brutally repressed on their own. 

Now, some of you might wonder, "if the United States was really this all powerful, why not target countries that pose even bigger security concerns, like Iran, or China, or even Venezuela?"  Well, they’re next.  Think of the Middle East and Russia as just the out-of-town premieres before a show gets on Broadway.  We’ve been working out the kinks to our methods, and now we think we’ve really perfected a universally applicable formula to apply to all our enemies in one fell swoop.  Remember the baptism scene in The Godfather?  Well, Hugo Chavez will wish he was Moe Green when we’re through with him. 

Happy holidays, authoritarian cabals!!