Is it anti-American to say that America shouldn’t be the leader of the world?

Philip Bennett, managing editor of the Washington Post, gave an interview to the Chinese People’s Daily Online, in which he said something that has outraged lots of people:

Yong Tang: In such sense, do you think America should be the leader of the world?

Bennett: No, I don’t think the U.S. should be the leader of the world. My job is helping my readers trying to understand what is happening now. What is happening now is very difficult to understand. The world is very complex. There are various complex forces occurring in it. I don’t think you can imagine a world where one country or one group of people could lead everybody else. I can’t imagine that could happen. I also think it is unhealthy to have one country as the leader of the world. People in other countries don’t want to be led by foreign countries. They may want to have good relations with it or they may want to share with what is good in that country.

Conservative bloggers condemned Bennett. Posters at Lucianne.com erupted, calling him a Commie and a traitor. For example:

Reply 3—Posted by: Mr. Bubba, 3/14/2005 8:23:14 AM

This is TREASON!

Then this:

Reply 5—Posted by: Delta Dave, 3/14/2005 8:29:46 AM

“Bennett: No, I don’t think US should be the leader of the world. My job is helping my readers trying to understand what is happening now. What is happening now is very difficult to understand. The world is very complex.”

What’s so complex about the world. There are people who are trying to kill us and end our way of life and if they could, enslave us. That’s not very hard to understand. It has nothing to do with emotions like other people loving us or hating us….it has to do with self-preservation. Either you are with us or you are against us. Not a very complex and logical concept.

The last poster, Delta Dave, inadvertently demonstrates the intellectual confusion that is at the root of the anger against Bennett. Yes, when America and its vital interests are threatened, we have the right and duty to defend ourselves. The problem is that President Bush and his supporters have conflated national defense with U.S. global domination. Bush did this quite explicitly in his inaugural speech, when he said that tyranny anywhere in the world is a threat to American freedom, and that America can only be safe if it imposes “democracy” on the whole world. As a result of this sort of imperial thinking, if a person says that the U.S. should not run the world, the L-dotters translate that into saying that the U.S. has no right to defend itself, and they naturally regard that person as a traitor. If America would reject the imperialistic, “democratize-the-globe” ideology of recent years and return to a more traditional and limited sense of national security, national interest, and, most of all, national identity, then disagreement with an overreaching policy such as Bush’s would no longer be seen as treason.

This is not to excuse the whole tone of Bennett’s remarks, in which, in typically left-liberal manner, he throws doubt over everything the American government says and does and warmly praises the Communist Chinese. That he is making such remarks in a foreign publication is objectionable in the extreme, though, of course, such behavior by leftists and left-liberals has become common in recent years. Here I was only addressing the question of whether it is treasonous to say that the U.S. should not run the world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 14, 2005 02:41 PM | Send