Alone Time

So cam across a post on LinkedIn of a bearded man wearing a shirt that read: "Hunt your local pedophiles" and holding up a handwritten a sign with the following:

This is the USA. There is no one Coming to our rescue if things go sideways. No one will be resupplying us. No one will airdrop food, ammunition, medicine. There is no place to escape to for freedom. This is it!

As might be expected, this sparked people to loudly agree or disagree in the comments. But the partisan sniping kind of missed the broader point. While it's common for people in other parts of the world to look at the individualism of Americans and shake their heads, this guy and his sign explains it all. It's a simple matter of the perception that no-one else cares about things that are important.

On the one hand, the United States may well have to go it alone if things "go sideways" enough that the nation is in real danger of being overrun by a hostile foreign power. But that's because it's difficult to imagine that most other nations would realistically be able to stand up to a nation that was able to decisively win against the armed forces of the United States. The air superiority that this hypothetical hostile nation would need to have would render airdropping supplies to beleaguered American citizens a difficult undertaking. Likewise, it's doubtful that Canada or Mexico would be able to protect American refugees if the invaders wanted to pursue them.

But the sentiment of the sign is that there is a peculiarly American understanding of "freedom" that other nations aren't interesting in fighting to maintain, and wouldn't be willing to offer fugitive Americans in the case of an armed conflict on American soil. But even to the extent that it's true, it's more a symptom of the American Right's contempt for other nations than it is anything else. If we understand the sign holder to be referencing the "Culture Wars" in the United States morphing into an actual armed conflict, that the Right were to find itself on the losing end of, it makes sense that foreign powers would be unlikely to mobilize to the rescue Trumpism. They'd likely have their own issues to be concerned with. And big players, especially China and Russia would be too busy stoking the flames of conflict for their own purposes to be bothered with helping either side. And as for, say, Western European nations, why would they be interested in assisting a side that holds them, and their values, in open contempt? Okay, so their may be some nations that hold the American Right to be their natural allies. None of the ones that come immediately to mind strike me as being able to project force across oceans.

The American Right sees itself as assailed on all sides because the sense of threat is useful for binding people together. This isn't anything new or different. To go back to Russia and China, both nations have official narratives that cast the United States as a hostile and evil power that requires everyone in the country to band together to resist. It's a common way of looking at the world.

Nations tend to have one common reason for not concerning themselves with what happens to people in other nations... they don't see paying the costs of intervention as in their interests. That tends to be true in international conflicts, and it's nearly universal in intra-national conflicts. It's even true within nations. Black lives don't seem to matter in the United States because the deaths of people like Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland didn't make a broader difference in the lives of public. Their deaths were individual tragedies, but not national losses. The same could be said of partisan America. While a wholesale killing of one group or another would be a national tragedy, the rest of the world would go on as normal.

The world looks upon the man holding the sign and asks why they should be in any hurry to come to his rescue... what would be in it for them? And sometimes, that's the problem with being "exceptional." It's too easy to put oneself in a position where others don't really need anything from one, or at least not enough to spend resources on one's behalf.