The late Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. ambassador and secretary of state, once referred to the United States as the “indispensable nation.” This catchy phrase has been invoked by U.S. politicians and analysts ever since, nearly a quarter-century after it was first uttered.
The U.S., however, can be a quite self-centered nation too. Americans witnessed this during the multiday saga last week on the floor of the House of Representatives as Republican lawmakers fought among themselves over who deserved the speakership. Kevin McCarthy eventually claimed the gavel on the 15th vote in the middle of the night.
Americans also read and watched this narcissism play out in the commentary dissecting the speakership vote.
If you didn’t know any better, you would think the chaos that played out on the House floor dragged the U.S. into a less advantageous position in the world. America’s allies and adversaries, we have been told, are watching — and the conclusion they were making was that America’s institutional foundations were rotting from within. “It’s a disgrace,” U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts told Boston Public Radio about the speaker vote. “The world is watching, and this is simply dysfunctional.” David Jolly, a former congressman from Florida and an MSNBC contributor, offered a similar analysis: “We have one chamber of our bicameral legislature that is now not functioning. That creates an image of instability across the world stage.” Jan-Werner Mueller, a columnist for The Guardian, went so far as to suggest that autocrats around the world were feeling a sense of comfort over the tumult in the House.
Here’s a news flash: Countries like Russia, China and Iran weren’t spending their days last week fixated on the arcane procedures of the House floor. Nor do these nations care who serves as third in line to the presidency. They have bigger priorities to deal with, and none of them involves wondering whether American democracy will survive. (Which it will.)
Take Russia. The country enters 2023 in a woefully degraded strategic position, with its wealth and power weakened courtesy of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine. The Russian military is not only facing immense casualties in Ukraine — last November, the Pentagon estimated more than 100,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured since the war began in February. It also is continuing to commit extremely costly mistakes on the battlefield, such as jamming soldiers into a single location only a few miles from the front line and throwing fresh recruits into battle without enough equipment.
The Russian economy, never great to begin with, contracted by almost 3% last year, and Russia’s labor pool is shrinking as working-age men are being rounded up and thrown into the Ukrainian meat grinder. Thanks to European Union sanctions and self-sabotage, Moscow has lost its biggest customer in the energy market; with the exception of Hungary and Bulgaria, Europe’s markets are now closed to the Russian oil industry.
China is undergoing significant domestic turbulence itself. While the protests against the Chinese Communist Party’s "COVID-zero" lockdown policy ended long ago, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is now contending with a coronavirus resurgence that makes America’s own look pale in comparison. Approximately 250 million people were infected by the virus in the first 20 days of December. If the director of the health commission in Henan province is correct, this specific area is seeing a positivity rate of 89%, which is almost unheard of.
Xi, so desperate to demonstrate his unity of command and competency as a leader, looks downright incompetent in the face of China’s largest public health crisis to date. China’s hospital wards are overflowing with the sick, dead and dying, a scenario due in part to Beijing’s inability to roll out an effective vaccination campaign for its older population. Xi wanted to prevent infections from sweeping across the country, but his policies have done precisely the opposite.
Iran, meanwhile, is in the throes of its biggest demonstrations since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Unlike previous protest movements in the late 1990s, 2009 and 2017-18, Iranian security forces are having a difficult time squelching the broad-based movement, even as hundreds of Iranian protesters have been killed and at least 14,000 have been arrested.
The Iranian government itself is increasingly divided over how to mollify the protesters; some in the hard-line camp are beginning to advocate dialogue with the protesters, while others are inching toward enacting cosmetic reforms to law enforcement as a way of slowing down their momentum. This, coupled with the likely demise of nuclear pact negotiations and the persistence of U.S.-led sanctions on the Iranian economy, amounts to the Iranian government facing a simultaneous political and economic crisis.
None of this is to say that last week’s barnburner on the House floor wasn’t embarrassing for those who were an intimate part of it. McCarthy, for instance, was so desperate to attain the gavel that he spent days groveling to conservative holdouts for their votes. A man who hopes to exert control over the lower chamber was relegated to bribing his way into the office. By the time the ordeal was over, McCarthy had his name on the speaker’s office. But that came at a considerable price, including a series of rules changes that give rank-and-file members more power over how the House operates.
However, to argue the U.S. embarrassed itself in the eyes of the world or somehow delivered its chief adversaries a propaganda coup isn’t serious analysis. It’s narcissism at its finest.
