12 The New York Review
halls with their assault rifles, unper-
turbed by the state police. Again, why?
Fuck you, the mob explained.
On your laptop you saw a Black
man, George Floyd, murdered by a po-
lice officer. You were aware that these
things happened, but now you knew it
in the marrow of your bones. And I was
ashamed that it took me this long to get
it. (Sorry, I meant “you.”) You were
surprised and heartened to see Amer-
icans from every walk of life down in
the streets to voice their disgust. Young
people, old people, couples with kids
in strollers. You were stunned that the
protests actually forced a response by
mayors and police chiefs across the
country. Something was moving, and in
the right direction. America, it seemed,
was finally ready to address this. So you
wondered whether you had been wrong
about your country, whether the past
four years in your little media bubble
had skewed your vision.
Then you stopped wondering.
Marches soon led to riots and looting by
people demanding that the police be de-
funded—a performative contradiction,
a philosopher might say; nihilistic left-
wing goons, mainly white, it appeared,
infiltrated the marches and attacked
police; nihilistic right- wing goons, all
white, came out with guns to do battle
with them; people died; cops decked
out in absurd military gear randomly
cracked heads, drove into crowds, and
dragged people into unmarked cars; the
president cynically threatened to inter-
vene; a senator wrote an op- ed support-
ing the idea; the opinion editor at The
New York Times was fired for publish-
ing it; major institutions felt compelled
to make statements about racial justice;
people clashed over what to say, tempers
rose, and intellectual marines launched
an assault on a citadel of the New Jim
Crow: the Poetry Foundation in Chi-
cago, Illinois. In the early Sixties white
college students traveled to the South,
risking their lives to defend African-
Americans’ voting rights. Today they
safely scream at white adults in north-
ern restaurants, ordering them to raise
their fists in solidarity with a slogan.
What demons are at work here? You
don’t know. But at least you know you
don’t know. That’s a start. That’s where
doctors begin when trying to diagnose
patients with bizarre symptoms that
may indicate a fatal disease. They dis-
trust theories and try to see what they
see. They go slow and keep their wits
about them. That is your most precious
possession right now: your wits. Try not
to lose them. Q
Jessica T. Mathews
Once again, as in 2016, foreign and se-
curity policy are almost absent from
the presidential campaign. Domestic
issues are the overwhelming priori-
ties in this election, as they should be.
Nonetheless, ignoring America’s place
in the world amounts to a dangerous
disregard for the gravity of the choices
the next president will make.
The country has nothing approach-
ing, and urgently needs, a clear goal
and a strategy for its relations with
China, a great- power adversary that
is also an economic powerhouse—a
combination the US has not confronted
before. Its relations with Russia are ter-
rible, mired in mistrust. Both Iran and
North Korea have made significant ad-
vances in their nuclear programs in the
last four years. Signals from Pyongyang
suggest that it may soon resume nu-
clear and ICBM testing after the failure
of Trump’s unserious diplomacy. Inter-
national institutions across the globe
are weakened. The US trade deficit
has widened. Arms control agreements
are disappearing, and the US is mak-
ing early commitments to a $2 trillion
modernization of its nuclear forces,
moving away from deterrence and to-
ward nuclear weapons for war fighting.
America’s word means less than it ever
has, and its international standing has
taken a huge blow from chaotic policies
abroad and a stunning inability to han-
dle the pandemic at home.
Most of this depressing summary
is the result of Trump’s policies. But
something larger is involved. The US
is in a long, unsettled transition away
from its post–World War II approach to
global affairs and toward an undefined
destination. The old approach, which
enjoyed bipartisan support for roughly
five decades, assumed that Washington
would lead what was then called the
free world through military strength,
economic largesse, a global network of
allies, alliances, and international insti-
tutions, and that it would, in addition
to pursuing its strictly national interests,
strive to advance democracy, capitalism,
and human rights worldwide. But since
the end of the cold war, economic glo-
balization, the meteoric ascent of China,
and the widespread rise of populism
have sharply reduced the dominance
that made such a strategy possible.
With it has gone the consensus that
long underlay US foreign policy. The
Senate has been unable to ratify a sin-
gle multilateral treaty for twenty- five
years. The candidates do not address
the longer term, but experts are argu-
ing passionately over whether the US
should shrink its international ambi-
tions or would damage its interests
more by doing too little than by trying
to do too much. Moreover, there is no
substitute on the global horizon for
American leadership. But there can be
little doubt that the disappearance of
the Soviet enemy, unending wars in the
Middle East, slow economic growth,
widening inequality at home, and grow-
ing domestic needs have weakened
most Americans’ interest in exercis-
ing international leadership. Trump’s
America Firstism recognized a preex-
isting condition; it did not create it.
If Trump wins this election we will
have more of the same: an inexplicable
fondness for Russian president Vladi-
mir Putin and a partiality for dictators
generally; a disgust for democratic allies
and a preference for undoing whatever
Trump’s predecessors have built, which
could extend to the US pulling out of
NATO; and continued incoherence, al-
ternating between fawning praise, bel-
ligerence, and withering criticism, in
our relations with China. Erratic poli-
cies around the world will continue to
put misplaced reliance on sanctions
and bluster. We will also see a likely
end to arms control, continued denial
of climate change, policies to weaken
international institutions, and a run-
ning leap into a new nuclear arms race.
If Biden is elected there will be none
of that, which is saying a great deal. He
understands the strength that lies in
America’s global network of allies and
in the institutions the US has built and
led to manage trade, financial volatility,
global health, nuclear proliferation, andmore. But Biden’s decades in govern-
ment and the policies he has proposed
over the past year give cause for a dif-
ferent concern. He seems to imagine a
return to the vanished world of the cold
war, with Washington “back at the head
of the table.” He has promised, for exam-
ple, to quickly convene a global Climate
Summit and a Summit for Democracy,
with the US somehow forcing progress
by exercising “moral authority” it no
longer possesses in either domain.
Such a return to policies of the past
is destined to fail. It cannot compare to
the costs of more Trumpism, but nei-
ther is it what the US—and the world—
needs. To succeed as president, Biden
would have to do what no one has yet
done: for the first time in decades de-
fine a new approach to international
affairs that reflects current global chal-
lenges as well as American resources,
influence, and political will. QMinae Mizumura
One lazy afternoon a few years ago,
a woman my age was giving me acu-
puncture. We were talking about our
childhoods and how America used to
represent everything that was good and
enviable. “You know, folks around me
used to say it doesn’t snow in Amer-
ica,” she said, laughing. She was from
Yamagata, part of the famous “snow
country” of northern Japan. I joined
her in laughing, remembering those in-
nocent days.
When World War II ended, nearly ev-
eryone on earth, including Americans
themselves, admired America. So did
the Japanese. We now know, of course,
that the Allied occupation forces me-
ticulously controlled the media so that
no criticism saw the light of day; the
nation was to repent and welcome its
defeat. Cynics say the population was
brainwashed, and I find myself often
agreeing with that assessment. After
all, America dropped the A-bomb; the
Tokyo Trial was victor’s justice; and so
on. Ultimately, however, I have always
concluded—if somewhat grudgingly—
that the nation’s admiration was jus-
tified. America showed generosity
toward the defeated; its people wanted
a better world for everyone.
Life soon surprised me with the
chance to live in America. When I
was twelve, my father’s business took
me and my family to New York, where
we ended up staying for twenty years,
from 1963 to 1983. As uprooted chil-
dren often do, I refused to adapt to my
new environment and turned into an
antisocial little Japanese patriot. But
even during those years of rebellion,
at a time when American soldiers were
fighting a senseless war in a faraway
land and society was in turmoil, I never
doubted that the US as a whole wasfundamentally a moral nation. Look-
ing back, it seems to me now that my
stay there may have coincided with the
country’s last best years.
Trust planted in a little girl’s mind
stays with her. Yet, following my re-
turn to Tokyo, signs kept growing that
something was amiss in the US. After
a while, those signs began exploding.
What? What? I kept saying to myself,
bewildered and incredulous. And then
came President Trump. I remember the
day he was elected. I had to take the
bullet train to Kyoto. When I arrived, a
newspaper vendor was handing out ex-
tras at the station. As I held the sheet in
my hand, my mind went numb. Noises
around me ceased to exist. My shock
was surely no less acute than what my
American friends were feeling at that
very moment on the other side of the
globe, unable to sleep. For the next
four years, I felt as if they and I were
riding the same roller coaster—a roller
coaster that just kept plunging lower
and lower. Trump seemed to revel in
his amorality. The more he assaulted
the human decency that had created
America’s praise worthy institutions
and ideals, the more his orange face
glowed.
But I am not American. I was not rid-
ing the same roller coaster as my Amer-
ican friends. The realization hit me
recently when my husband and I were
watching a clip of Trump supporters
cheering as if possessed. “Poor Ameri-
cans!” he said. “To think that the whole
world is watching this.” I detected some-
thing in his voice, and then I knew: what
Trump exposed to the rest of the world
was not only his unholy self. More to the
detriment of the US, what he exposed
was the spectacle of Americans making
fools of themselves in MAGA rallies,
on the streets, and in Congress. Idiotic,
hateful, or shamelessly obsequious, they
betrayed the image long ingrained in me
of America as a nation of big-hearted,
fair-minded people. I felt aghast, ap-
palled, even ashamed. Yet I also often
felt a bizarre exhilaration—a kind of
schadenfreude—on seeing so many
Americans brought so low. Ha! Look
at you now! I wanted to cry out. And
this reaction I could not possibly expect
my dear American friends to share.
Yet the gravity of the 2020 US elec-
tion is such that any schadenfreude of
mine is beside the point. Not for one
second do I wish Trump to win. Not
even for one nanosecond. I believe this
is also true of the many people around
the world who may harbor, despite
themselves, sentiments similar to mine.
The world has become so intertwined
that we simply cannot afford another
four years—or, God forbid, more than
that—of Trump wrecking our future,
especially now when that future is im-
periled by the threat of a renewed arms
race and the ever-accelerating warming
of our planet—our only planet. I will
gladly adore America once again if the
country makes a decisive turnabout in
November. America doesn’t have to be
“great again.” A decent America will
be a force to celebrate. QDarryl Pinckney
I am too hurt by 2016 to trust. Four
years of outrages against the Republic
and Us, the People, from the chief
crony on Pennsylvania Avenue have
made the United States of America