ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: US yearns for return to role as 20th-century hero

One of my great heroes, American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, celebrated the emergence of new theories with the warning that unless the evidence supports it, it should be abandoned and new ones should be searched for.

I have been mulling over a theory — more an idea, actually — that may best be described in an almost childlike iteration: “America is so 20th century”. We should not heap scorn on the “childlike” reference because children sometimes ask the most profound questions. 

I have been spending time in the East learning about geopolitical and geostrategic issues in the region, and trying to get a more granular “feel” for this shift to the East that has slipped into common knowledge over the past two decades.

Many serious shifts are under way in the region. Most of them are good, and are about deeper integration of Southeast Asian states into an Asia dominated by China. Others pose significant threats, disruptions and challenges.

One that readily comes to mind is discussions about creating a land bridge of sorts across Thailand that would bypass the Malacca Strait and major ports in Singapore, the world’s largest transshipment port, and Malaysia’s major transshipment terminals.

The envisaged land bridge is a resuscitation of a 400-year-old idea of the Kra Canal, in the region of present-day Thailand, proposed by King Narai of Ayutthaya in 1677.

After the large global political shifts there is a sense that countries in the region, especially China — the main challenger to the US for international management, co-operation and development — is looking ahead and building hard and soft infrastructure for the future. As putative next hegemon, China is also building up its military; hegemonic powers and orders are necessarily shored up by military strength.

Greater openness

There seems to be a pull in the opposite direction in the US. Considering the spreading “antiglobalism” in that country, persistent references to “communist China” as the new bête noir of “the free world”, and a startling pair of recent developments, it’s difficult to shake the belief that the US remains locked in the 20th century.

One of the developments is the way Tim Cook of Apple was received, with great excitement, when he visited China last week, surely a sign of greater openness and of embracing change and transformation. The other is the almost inquisitorial questioning of TikTok’s Singaporean boss, Chew Shou, by US senator Tom Cotton about any ties he might have with the Chinese Communist Party.

Cotton’s questioning caused the Washington Post to remark that the senator’s conduct was a throwback to the anticommunism of the McCarthy era in the US, when legislators tossed about accusations of subversion and treason with little regard for the facts.

Cotton’s inquisition would contribute to the US legislature passing (overwhelmingly) a bill that gives TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, six months to divest its American assets or face a nationwide ban.   

The takeaway of this pair of developments is that while China continues to open up, the US seems to be closing down, retreating to the safety of earlier periods of “American greatness” and the safety blanket of “anticommunism”. This makes it difficult to disagree with the statement that “America is so 20th century”.

Almost all the wars of the last century were fought over ideas and ideologies, the most pronounced of which were the European wars between 1914 and 1945 andthe battles and proxy wars between Soviet communism and American capitalism, with wars about self-determination filling in the blank spaces. The late British historian Eric Hobsbawm thought that “the 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history”. 

Gravediggers

The legacy of that century, he said, was “of war’s increasingly powerful machinery of mass propaganda, and of a period of confrontation between incompatible and passion-laden ideologies that brought into wars a crusading element comparable to that seen in religious conflicts of the past”. 

It was in 1956 that Nikita Khrushchev threatened to “bury” the US not through violent conflict but through industrial development and economic expansion, saying that was then the Soviet Union would be the gravedigger and pallbearer at the funeral of liberal capitalism. He was wrong, but it looks like China may well be up to the task.

Like the way that the US fought the Soviets in the great contest of the previous century, Americans seem to have wrapped themselves in the safety blanket of anticommunism and preparing for war. No-one else is more concerned about an impending war. No-one else seems more obsessed with communism.

I may have to produce much more evidence to support the theory that the US wants to return to the comforts of being the good actor in the piece, fighting for freedom against the nasty communists. We will have to wait and see. For now though, the kids are all right. It does seem that America is so 20th century. 

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.