In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
David Brooks: Gail, I'd like to start by asking you about embarrassing omissions. Are there books you haven't read or places you haven't been that you really should have in your cultural repertoire?
Gail Collins: Good grief, David. I'm not going to compare cultural repertoire defects with you. You've read half the books in the world.
David: Actually, my gaps are glaring. Pretty much everything by Dickens is a void for me — I just can't get into the guy. And every epic poem ever written except "The Divine Comedy." If I'm going to read a story, I need paragraphs.
Gail: O.K, that makes me feel better. There's nobody I love better than Charles Dickens. "Bleak House" was my inspiration as a pundit. Also, since you don't read epic poetry I am going to pretend that I do. Yes! "Orlando Furioso" is my favorite.
David: As for places, I have never been to Norway, which you just visited, but I don't feel any moral obligation to see Scandinavia again. I should have visited Greece, Turkey and Japan, though.
Gail: David, are you suggesting that I attempted to raise questions about your geographic well-roundedness by telling you I've been to Norway? Honestly, you don't have to go. It's all right.
David: I raise this question for grand strategic reasons, naturally. Over the past few years the United States has been guilty of an embarrassing glaring omission. A succession of presidents has neglected to shore up the global state system.
Gail: Stop a second. When people bring up terms like "global state system," I tend to blank out. Perhaps it's like you with Dickens. But please, rephrase. Do you mean the United Nations and NATO or just a general working-together by countries of good will?
David: I'd put it this way. In the past, maintaining the global state system was almost instinctual for presidents. From Franklin Roosevelt through George H.W. Bush, we've had a series of leaders whose foreign policy visions were formed by the conflicts against fascism and communism. These leaders had a reflexive commitment to global institutions that contributed to global regularity and order. Leaders of this generation know how much effort it took to tend to these institutions.
But baby boomers — yes, this is another thing people can blame our generation for — did not grow up with that consciousness.
Gail: I should have known. Nothing bad exists that was not the fruit of the boomers. Do you remember all those years when we ruled? First the older generation worried about why we were so ticked off and asked themselves how they failed us. Then every company in the world asked what it would take to make us buy their stuff. I should have known there'd be payback.
Now we're just the dumping ground for every problem from rising health costs to declining productivity.
And we've also screwed up the global state system? I warn you David, it's just a matter of minutes before somebody starts talking about building ice floes to put us on. Despite global warming, which is undoubtedly our fault too.
David: Well yes, you make a good point, but let me continue on this theme. The decline in the management of this global system came from the right: George W. Bush's weak coalition building skills —and from the left: President Obama's tendency to withdraw to attend to nation-building at home.
Gail: That's a nice way of putting it. By "attend to nation-building at home," I presume you mean "wrestling with the crazed domestic right wing."
I'm not sure I'm going to agree with your theory, but finish it before I say something unsupportive.
David: America's leadership problems have been compounded by the fact that Europe has not been able to coordinate an effective military or foreign policy apparatus. And a new superpower, China, has failed to accept any responsibility for maintaining the system by which it rose.
The result is like when the normal teacher is off sick and the substitute teacher takes over. Do you remember those days? Every student started off a little more rambunctious. The class clowns and bullies picked and probed to see what they could get away with.
Gail: You're looking at a decline of presidential leadership since World War II. I see a western world that has learned painfully, over and over again, how impossible it is to fight a ground war in other people's countries. Particularly on a planet where your friends aren't the only ones with weapons of mass destruction.
So maybe it's not the presidents who have changed, but the world they confront.
David: In the Middle East the decline of the state system has created a vacuum that religious armies have filled. Conflict in the region is no longer defined by the Arab-Israeli dispute. That's now a sideshow to the Arab vs. Arab war that is taking place on about four levels at once. It's amazing. Since 1648 religion has been largely neutralized as a force in foreign affairs, but now ISIS wants to replace state system rules with religious war rules. Arab identities will be defined by the Sunni/Shiite rivalry and by fealty to jihadism.
Gail: You're right, it is amazing, although I don't think it's unique to the Arabs. Having spent a little part of my younger days in Northern Ireland, I do kind of understand people's capacity to use religion as an all-purpose cover for fights that are really about historic grievances.
David: All of this brings us home to President Obama.
Gail: I knew you were going to bring us back to President Obama.
David: It's funny, but I don't think his problem is conceptual. Occasionally he will say something unfortunate, like the time he told donors that the world is always messy. That is a completely inadequate diagnosis of the degradation of the global state system.
Gail: I agree it was unfortunate, but I heard it a different way. That it's harder for the developed world to just go in there and bang heads because people who are all connected through the Internet can no longer close their eyes and shrug about the collateral damage. It made him sound as if he regretted those good old days, although I'm sure he didn't mean it that way.
I do wonder if we would have bombed Japan if we knew everybody in Hiroshima had a smart phone.
David: In general, President Obama's descriptions of the threats to the global order are robust and accurate. Yet there is a yawning chasm between his comments and his policies. He says ISIS is a cancer that can't be tolerated anywhere. Yet his policies, at least so far, don't lead to the destruction of ISIS, especially inside Syria. He understands that Vladimir Putin threatens the norm that big nations don't gobble up little ones, and yet he is against giving Ukrainians the weapons they need to deter attack.
Gail: Without getting into Ukraine I do want to question the idea that the answer to all the problems of the world is to give the other side a whole bunch of weapons. How did ISIS get to be such a huge threat? In part because it was able to capture weaponry that we gave to Iraq.
David: What do you think the president should say tonight and do afterward?
Gail: Well, I am pretty sure that you'll get your wish about the global state system. He'll talk about his plans in the context of an international alliance of some sort.
David: I suspect tonight's address will be the defining talk of his last two years. He's learned that, especially in foreign affairs, presidents don't get to choose their policies. A guy who came amid promises of withdrawal, amid talk of a pivot to Asia, vowing to do nation building at home, and arguing that military force is usually not the answer, is now going to be pivoting to the Middle East and using military force.
We are playthings of fate.
Gail: Here's the thing we're going to see with every post-9/11 president: They come in with principled theories about what they're going to do, and then they read the intelligence and listen to their advisers spin the most horrific projections possible about what could happen. What terrorists are trying to do. And they imagine the awful things that could happen under their watch.
Barack Obama isn't going to be the only expert in constitutional law who comes into office and tolerates unconstitutional wiretaps. I think history will judge he was wrong on that point. But there's an excellent chance that history will also find that rather being slow on the war with ISIS, he was generally very smart in erring on the side of caution.
David: I suspect President Obama will be forced by circumstances to go against his inclinations and goals. He simply cannot leave office with ISIS in good shape. He wasn't elected to democratize Iraq. He was elected amid promises that he would destroy Al Qaeda and its offshoots.
Gail: He was elected as the guy who promised not to get us involved in any more stupid wars. And that's still an excellent goal.
David: One hard part, I'd say, is that Obama is governing at a time of low legitimacy, when people don't really believe America can be an effective player in the world. I suspect Obama shares this belief to some extent. And he's got to persuade current voters, in a way the WWII generation never needed to be persuaded, that the democratic community can be effective at defeating tyranny.
To do this he somehow has to set more realistic goals. Obviously George W. Bush's goals of spreading freedom and defeating evil were too lofty, but that doesn't mean we need to flip over and fatalistically assume we can do nothing. President Obama's assaults on ISIS have so far borne enormous fruit. Sometimes force works. Sometimes war is the answer.
Gail: So I think you're saying that Obama's doing pretty darned well.
Let's go back to where we started. Which was you mourning the loss of the global state system. Well, first you dissed Charles Dickens and Norway. But then it was the global state system.
And I still hate that phrase. Can't we just say something like "working effectively with our allies?" And if so, do you really think a President Romney or McCain could have done it better?
David: The hard part is explaining to the American people what the system is. You can barely see it or feel it. But it is the unconscious background for everybody's behavior, the good guys as well as the bad guys.
Gail: True, but I think it's in better shape now than it would have been with a different president.
And I hope it's a really good speech. I want Obama to take on all the jerks who are yelling about how we need to go in there and squash the enemy like a bug, or fight like men, or just blow the bad guys to smithereens.
We've long discovered he's not the magic wordsmith we thought he was during his first run for office. But I hope he explains his plans tonight in a way that makes people feel like we can be strong and sensible at the same time.
David: None of the individual problems we face is going to threaten American interests. It wouldn't be worth expending significant resources, even on the horrific Syrian civil war, if that was all that was at stake. But those kinds of conflicts are undermining the whole system of shared assumptions that kept everybody in line.
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