Welcome to the Interregnum

If our reign as the enforcer of the Pax Americana is over, what will replace it?

By Jonah Goldberg

(© Dutchscenery/Dreamstime)

Jonah Goldberg

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear Reader (and listeners even though you will never hear this “news”letter by pressing your ear to the screen, NO MATTER HOW LOUDLY I TYPE!),
If you replace the phrase “the international community” with “the Klingons” it often makes more sense. The Islamic State can only be defeated if the Klingons are resolute. America can’t do this alone — we need the Klingons. Why don’t the Klingons handle this one?
Here’s Obama at that press conference in Estonia:

. . . we know that if we are joined by the Klingons we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem. And the question is going to be making sure we’ve got the right strategy, but also making sure that we’ve got the international will to do it. This is something that is a continuation of a problem we’ve seen certainly since 9/11, but before. And it continues to metastasize in different ways.
And what we’ve got to do is make sure that we are organizing the Arab world, the Middle East, the Muslim world along with the Klingons to isolate this cancer, this particular brand of extremism that is, first and foremost, destructive to the Muslim world and the Arab world and North Africa, and the people who live there. They’re the ones who are most severely . . . [blah blah blah]

Now, I know what you’re going to say: “But the Klingons don’t exist!”
And my reply would be, “Neither does the international community!”
But, here’s the thing, if the Klingons existed they really would be useful in crushing the Islamic State, deterring Putin, etc. I mean how awesome would a giant bird-of-prey hovering over the Kremlin look? It’s entirely unclear that if the international community existed it would be of much use.
Besides, I’ve seen Klingons. I know what a Klingon looks like. I know what their language sounds like (mostly like a Hungarian choking on a chicken bone). I know a bit about their codes, customs, and beliefs. Heck, I’ve even seen pictures of a Klingon wedding. I’ve never seen an international-community wedding.
Now hold on, you say. There’s the U.N., the EU, the Apple Dumpling Gang at Davos. There’s the World Bank and the IMF, the African Union and the International House of Pancakes. Every time I turn on the NewsHour I see cookie-pushers in pinstripe suits sitting around plates of clever cheese and expensive bottled water having weighty discussions about things of International Weightiness. Isn’t that the international community? Meanwhile, those “Klingons” you see are just a bunch of actors and weirdoes playing make-believe.
To which I respond: And just what the Hell do you think the cookie-pushers are? John Kerry is the U.S. secretary of state. (He’s also a human toothache, but that’s another matter.) That is who he is. That title doesn’t come with dual citizenship in the international community. And whenever he pretends otherwise he’s doing exactly that: pretending, playing make-believe, acting every bit as much as a bat’leth wielding chiropodist from Scarsdale. The difference is that the chiropodist knows he’s just pretending. It is not at all clear that John Kerry understands that the international community is a convenient fiction.
The trouble with the phrase “international community” is that the first word negates the second. There is, of course, an international sphere or realm or space. But those words don’t imply a kind of civil society. Domestically there’s this whole ecosystem of institutions, customs, and people who interact with one another. Internationally there are nation-states, which have relations with each other, sometimes via institutions and alliances, a few non-state actors (both good and bad), and then there are animals, gravity, clouds, rainbows, and other things that are blind to the Westphalian system of nation-states. And that’s it. Domestically there’s a thick atmosphere, like an ocean teeming with life, called civil society, which is itself made up of communities. Internationally it’s a vacuum, like in space. No one would talk about interplanetary atmosphere.
(“Oh yeah,” you respond, “What about the platonic aether and solar radiation and dark matter!?” To which I reply, “Shut up.”)

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