This past Wednesday, I attended a round table discussion in D.C. with an eclectic group of other pundits, academics, and practitioners on the wide-open topic of where the heck America is or should be going in the world. The discussion took place under the Chatham House Rule so I won’t say anything about who was there or under whose auspices it was organized, but I was impressed by the breadth of the range of opinions and affiliations represented around that table. And the dinner wasn’t half bad either.
Here was the prompt for the discussion:
The frameworks that have long guided American foreign and domestic policy were not built for this moment. Trump’s second term, rapid technological, demographic and environmental change, and transformation of both the national security and economics landscape have exposed the limits of traditional U.S. policy thinking. Whoever succeeds Trump as president in 2029 will have to confront a radically different world to the one that foreign policy and domestic policy thinkers are used to. Our sense is that conversations and debates have not caught up to the changes in America’s external and internal circumstances. So, we are asking a few sharp thinkers to help us close the gap. How do we begin to think about the relationship between international and domestic politics at this juncture? How do economics and national security relate when China has become the lens through which we see both? And what do we need to do to catch up?
There were a couple of dozen of us in total, but I was one of a handful of participants tapped to kick start the conversation. My compatriots made some very broad and interesting points:
One argued that the most important thing is for the United States to abandon its ambition to maintain primacy, and so we need to build cross-ideological coalitions to turn America into more of a “normal” country.
Another argued that the challenge wasn’t so much to convince America to abandon the quest for primacy but to prevent bad reactions to losing it: either demoralization and accelerating decline (the path that, he argued, Britain has been on) or the rise of a revanchist politics aimed at restoring what was lost (the path that Russia has been on).
Yet another argued that the distinctive feature of the emerging world is personalism in both foreign and domestic policy, that states as traditionally understood—structured organizations pursuing the interests of the nations they represent—are less and less important while leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping increasingly operate on the world stage as in the domestic sphere, as individuals using the nations they lead as tools for pursuing their own interests.
In my own introductory spiel, I pointed out that the United States has essentially never experienced a world of the kind that might be emerging. In our youth, Britain was the globally dominant power: ruling the largest empire, commanding the seas, and using its own power in concert with allies to prevent any rival from challenging it. After a period of transition between World War I and World War II America inherited Britain’s role, and at our peak we became even more dominant than Britain had been. It’s not hard for us to imagine that we’re faced with a new potential transition, with China succeeding the U.S. as the dominant world power as we succeeded Britain, or that America’s core mission is to prevent such a transition, to constrain and ultimately subdue China as we did the Soviet Union. But if we’re transitioning to a more polycentric system with no globally dominant power, then we’re moving to a world that America has never truly experienced, one that we will have a hard time even comprehending.
That context presents America with unfamiliar and difficult choices. Do we want a decoupling Europe and a rising India to be stronger or weaker, knowing that the stronger they are the less tractable they will be and the less able any power will be to dominate the system as a whole, including us? Do we want to preserve America’s role as the lynchpin of the world financial system and provider of the currency of international commerce, or are we doomed to lose that exorbitant privilege and need to focus on preparing for a world without any single center of financial control or any single currency of commerce? Do we need an industrial policy to make us functionally independent of China, or would that pursuit only distract us from building on our comparative advantages—and is such a policy even possible in the context of true polycentrism (or America’s emerging fiscal constraints)?
Finally, I pointed out that we don’t even really know what the determinants of power will be in the future, given the realities of collapsing birthrates and the emergence of A.I. and advanced robotics. Will China’s impending demographic implosion mean that we don’t really need to worry about Chinese power for very long, but instead need to think about a future that belongs to South Asia and Africa? Or will these technological developments mean that any advanced country can punch well above the weight of its labor force—and if so, does that mean that China’s power could be more enduring or, rather, that a host of even smaller countries or non-state entities could credibly and repeatedly challenge established powers?
As should be clear, the discussion started at a very high level, and while we repeatedly dove down into specific, concrete questions (multiple participants enjoined us to avoid too much abstraction), it was genuinely encouraging to me, particularly in Washington, to hear so many people willing to engage with the possibility that so many of their fundamental assumptions may be obsolete. That willingness to entertain radically new perspectives in itself gave me hope.
As it happens, on my way down to D.C. I learned that the previous evening the famous Park Slope Food Coop had voted by a roughly two-to-one margin to boycott Israeli products. The world is changing in such unfathomable ways that it seems to be spinning off its axis half the time. But in my little corner of the universe, this, an “oh God not this again” story if ever there was one, is the most important story in the whole world.
I’ve never belonged to the Coop, and I’ve never wanted to. The produce they stock is great, but I don’t have any interest in being involved in the stocking, which is the kind of thing you have to do in order to be a member with privileges to shop there. Even before Covid drove everyone insane I found the culture of the place off-putting, and as the aforementioned vote suggests it has not normalized since. Mind you, I do understand the appeal of the place in the abstract. I think it’s really important for people to remain engaged in actually living their own lives rather than outsourcing it to professionals. Garden, cook, sing, have and raise kids—live, whatever living means to you. At our synagogue, we recently had a ceremony to welcome a new sefer Torah that a congregant had gifted to the synagogue, which involved inviting a soferet in and giving a variety of congregants the honor of “finishing” the scroll by resting their hands lightly on hers as she drew the letters and words of the last verse by hand using a quill pen. It was wonderful. But “how do we make high-quality groceries available to a wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn?” is a largely solved problem, and what the Coop does is manifestly not scalable to New York City as a whole, much less the world. The Park Slope Food Coop does not seem to me like a political project; it seems like a hobby, and that’s fine, but it’s not my hobby.
Perhaps because I live in one of the most self-involved neighborhoods in one of the most self-involved cities in the world, though, the symbolism of the Park Slope Food Coop looms far larger for those involved in it than its practical significance, which is nearly nil. It is the preeminent symbol of the neighborhood, arguably the last thread of continuity to its crunchy left-wing past. This symbolism was what made the battle over whether the Co-op would boycott Israeli products—which has been ongoing for at least a decade—so emotional to the people involved. It implicated people’s identities. So long as it sold Israeli products, you could still consider yourself connected to that crunchy left in some way even if you had warm feelings or even an ideological affinity for Israel. Since the ban passed, though, Israel has been affirmed to be a shibboleth; if you still refuse to reject it, then you are symbolically excommunicated.
Even considering the profundity of the communal identity involved, this story still really should only matter deeply to the people involved, which is to say: to members of the Coop, who number about 16,000. But both sides in this battle think it is about more than who and what is welcome at the Coop itself; both sides think it is about setting a precedent about what is morally unacceptable to say and how it is morally unacceptable to behave. Is it morally unacceptable to continue to treat Israel as a normal state? Or is it morally unacceptable to refuse to treat Israel as a normal state? Is boycotting Israeli tahini (as often as not made by companies employing or even owned by Palestinian Israelis, as is the case with the Seed+Mill and Al Arz brands) an antisemitic act? Or is playing the antisemitism card in such a case evidence that, well, the antisemites were onto something about how “the Jews” behave?
These questions are basically the text of Giant by Mark Rosenblatt—currently running on Broadway starring John Lithgow as Roald Dahl—which I saw Thursday night after returning from Washington. Lithgow’s performance is a tour de force and reason enough to see the show. The play is about an imagined meeting between Dahl and two representatives of his publisher—one British and well-known to Dahl, one American and a new face to him, both Jewish—on the eve of the launch of his novel, The Witches and only days after Dahl’s ferocious piece in The Literary Review—nominally a review of Tony Clifton’s God Cried—appeared, attacking Israel as the new Nazi Germany. The point of the meeting is damage control: the publisher wants Dahl to make some kind of mollifying statement to the press. But Dahl is not the kind of character who is interested in limiting damage, or in being limited himself in any way. He believes in what he said and sees any effort to blunt the hostility of the response as cowardice. He’s a version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, possessed of real virtues (talent and bravery, but also profound compassion), but utterly contemptuous of anyone he sees as in any way less noble than himself, and unwilling to even consider not telling them what he thinks of them right to their faces. By the end of the play, Dahl decides to sabotage himself and his hopes of a knighthood by telling a reporter precisely what he thinks, which is that while he used to think of himself as anti-Israeli, in time he has become an antisemite because, one infers, of how “the Jews” have treated him. Though the action of the play is imagined, and the timeline of what is not imagined has been compressed, this phone call, like the book review, are authentic.
I will confess that, while I obviously don’t share the fictional Dahl’s opinions, nor am I much like him as a person, I had a lot of sympathy for his position within the play. What he said in print was both incendiary and unreasonable; he was clearly an antisemite and even more clearly relished being rude and obnoxious; and he should of course have expected his publishers to demand that he do something to pour oil on waters that he himself had deliberately set a-boiling. Yet I kind of admired him for sticking to his poorly-aimed guns. And while I would never have spoken to anyone the way he spoke to his unfortunate American sales rep, I honestly empathized with his reaction to her better than I did her reaction to him. (My actual point of identification was the British Jew who is mostly caught in the crossfire.) She, after all, simply didn’t like something he wrote. He, on the other hand, was being asked to say something he didn’t believe.
The play had been described to me as another “can you separate the art from the artist” thing, as well as just being a compelling portrait of a fascinating monster, and it is both of those things. But I think it becomes clearer what else it’s about if you imagine going into the play as someone with commitments closer to Dahl’s own than as someone already likely to be horrified by what he said and interested to learn how such a man could also be a great writer. After watching the play, I did a little digging, and came upon this piece by Naim Attallah, the publisher both of God Cried and of The Literary Review and also the man who solicited the review from Dahl. I found it fascinating, confirming both the general outline of Dahl’s character as depicted in the play and revealing how these same events look from someone on the other side of the political divide from Dahl’s antagonists within the play—people, that is to say, who fundamentally agree with him about Israel even if they wouldn’t put it in quite the same words that he did in that review.
The effort to police what may and must be said strikes me as misguided on all sides, whether we’re talking about the BDS folks or AIPAC. I think we engage in such battles because they seem more winnable than the more existential ones taking place in the Holy Land, but they aren’t actually winnable and I believe that engaging in them makes resolving those more important conflicts more difficult, not easier. The last point I made at the round table in Washington answered a question about what people around the table can do. I said that a key impediment to assessing the difficult choices America faces is the way we have increasingly sorted into political tribes; that sorting puts epistemic blinders on us and cripples the feedback mechanisms of democracy, turning us into something more like Lebanon or Iraq where voting is about tribal self-protection not collective decision making. If we want to combat that, we have to actively get out of those silos: those around the table who worked for liberal or progressive publications or organizations needed to see a key part of their job as changing the minds of self-identified conservatives, and vice versa for those who worked for conservative or right-wing publications or organizations.
Doing that, though, means being able to understand and accept a way of looking at the world that you actively reject, and you won’t be able to understand it much less accept it if you can’t even hear it. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s even more true of organizations, but an organization cannot exhibit that quality unless it has a critical mass of members that pass that test individually.
If that is the case, then perhaps my neighbors are right, and the Park Slop Food Coop story is the most important one in the world after all.
"Perhaps because I live in one of the most self-involved neighborhoods in one of the most self-involved cities in the world, though, the symbolism of the Park Slope Food Coop looms far larger for those involved in it than its practical significance, which is nearly nil."
Lol. I think this connects to the first part of your piece though. It is precisely America's premier standing in the world that makes Americans sometimes think that they're doing something like foreign policy when they fight over things like BDS in their own little local corner.