The End of the Party

This week, hundreds of people lined up at Midtown Comics in New York to purchase the first edition of Marvel's new Spiderman issue, featuring Barack Obama. Some were skipping work, and some had even flown in that morning from out of town for the occasion. All of them stood outside for hours bracing sub-zero temperatures, and by 9 am the comic book was sold out. Obama's image -on t-shirts, buttons, commemorative coins, periodical magazines, coffee mugs, stamps, plates, bobblehead dolls, posters, comic books, and regular books- is the only thing that sells in these recessionary days. Why else would Doris Kearns Goodwin's one-thousand-page-long book about Lincoln rise up to the top of best-seller lists more than two years after publication? You can call it Obama's first stimulus package.

Similar crowds are flocking to train stations in the Northeast to catch a glimpse of the Amtrak cars taking Obama to Washington for the inauguration, replicating the last leg of Lincoln's journey in 1861. And millions are expected in the nation's capital on Tuesday for the great finale of a two-year love affair of Hollywoodesque proportions. I hear Bill Clinton prefers the moniker "greatest fairy tale ever."

I have partaken in this collective fever as much as anyone, but I cannot help detecting a hint of desperation (or is it hope?) in these quasi-religious manifestations of faith and devotion. It showcases -slightly altering a quote from Bill Maher- the genius of our marketing and the gullibility of our people. It follows the script of any typical American movie: the crisis is systemic and only an exceptional individual can redeem us and guide us through the valley of darkness. Americans chant Yes We Can, but what they mean is I Hope He Can.

And it's not just Americans. People all over the world welcomed Obama's election enthusiastically (with special intensity in Kenya and, for less sentimental reasons, in Obama, Japan). However, this should not be misconstrued as an expression of the world's hunger for American leadership. With few exceptions (Georgia, Taiwan and other East Asian countries, the littoral Arab statelets that surround Saudi Arabia, Darfur), most people want less America, not more. What they cheer is the end of American hegemony and unipolarity; what they hope for is a less intrusive and arrogant Uncle Sam. Be nice to the countries that lend you money, says the overseer of China's two-trillion dollars' worth of US bonds. Stay off the Middle East. Let Latin America follow its preferred course. Draw down the globe-spanning stretch of the US military. Spare other countries the lectures about democracy or capitalism. At a time when the United States' image in the world is associated with preventive war and torture, and Israel's actions are deemed monstrous by most people outside the United States, Western criticism of Russia's intervention in Georgia, or China's heavy-handed treatment of Tibetan dissidents only provokes laughter.

And that is why I am also apprehensive about the end of the honeymoon and the inevitable disappointment. I dread the day that a US bomb kills five children with Obama as commander-in-chief. I contemplate the possibility that the new president will not significantly cut down military spending, which doubled in the last eight years. I fear waking up to another victim of the tragedy of American diplomacy -William Appleman Williams' prescient opus on US foreign policy-, which suggests that Americans believe that other people cannot solve their problems unless they follow America's formula. Most of these nightmarish scenarios, in case you were wondering, feature Rahm Emanuel at one point or another.

If you read books about foreign policy, you have probably noticed that all of a sudden everyone is talking about a post-American world, a non-American world, and the end of American exceptionalism. The most prescient ones -Michael Mann, Emmanuel Todd, Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, and Yale Ferguson, among others- had been saying the same since 2003, dismissing as humbug all the hype about America's empire. The party is over in Wall Street, in the real estate market, and in consumption indexes, and US foreign policy should reflect this. One suspects that the United States will be better served by an Administration trying to transition smoothly into the new reality, rather than one that makes a last-ditch effort to stay on top and police the world. My careful reading of Obama's words gives me reasons to be optimistic, but I also know that effective politicians can be many things to many people, and new politicians are like blank pages onto which we project our own aspirations. Besides, that presidential bubble can be very hard to puncture. Even if they let him keep his BlackBerry.