Our leaders seem by now to respond reflexively to this strain in the American national character.  The administration's groping for a good reason to make war on Iraq kept coming back to one or another moral, internationalist principle--to punish "naked aggression" or enforce UN resolutions or establish a "new world order" or prevent a mad dictator from endangering the world with nuclear weapons.  When he visited the troops last November, Secretary of State Baker said that where American principles were at stake, there Americans must also be.  And the implication was another paradox: that these universal principles were somehow distinctively American.  Which, somehow, they are, though not necessarily so much to our credit as a nation as we sometimes like to think.

Interestingly, Baker said later (in Bermuda and not among the troops) that if you boiled it all down to its essence, we were in the Middle East for the sake of "jobs"--which is to say the narrowly conceived national interest as any nation might understand it.  On one level this looks like hypocrisy, but in the context of the whole history of America's definition of its national interest, it is not necessarily easy to tell which justification is the public pose and which is the real motivator.  My guess is that Baker, for the moment anyway, thought that "jobs" would sell better with the public than the noble internationalism that had been tried hitherto.  But which of the two explanations is more truly the feeling of Baker or Bush as individuals is anyone's guess.

Something of the same confusion becomes apparent in Dances With Wolves when the renegade lieutenant tells the audience one of the things he means by finding out who he really is among the alien Sioux.  He says that, as a soldier in the Union Army, he had never felt particularly inspired by the just cause he was fighting for, but that, as an Indian, it made perfect sense to him to fight and kill marauders from other tribes in order to protect the winter food store.

Maybe Secretary Baker's remarks about "jobs" was an implicit recognition of the limits to which the popular imagination can be stretched on behalf of noble principles.  But the principles are never left long out of use because they are part of American's conception of their country--which is everybody's country, the universalist's homeland, rather as the Dallas Cowboys used to advertise themselves, for reasons that were never very clear to me, as "America's team."  How could that be?  How could they be distinctively Dallas's, play against Washington or New York or Philadelphia, and call themselves America's team?  Because it is in the nature of American particularism to aspire to the universal.

James Bowman is the American correspondent of the London Spectator.

Essay Types: Essay