Editorials

Driving west on Interstate 40 toward Asheville, N.C., quite suddenly the blue hills grow higher and higher — a column of mountains marching solemnly out to the horizon, their winter tops as prickly as a three-day-old beard.

It is a majestic sight, but for a couple recently returned from the Alps as seen from the Provence Region in the South of France, something was missing from the Appalachians; there were no fortresses.

Everywhere one looks in Provence, there are visible reminders of antiquity: mountaintop ruins of vanished nobility, crumbling Roman forts, intact Roman aqueducts and bridges or a medieval monastery.

Here is the castle of the infamous Marquis de Sade, where we asked what we'd see if we returned for the de Sade festival and were told we'd be disappointed.

There is the 10th century monastery and mental hospital, Cloitre Saint-Paul de Mausole, where in 1889 the mad genius Vincent Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night,” its central Cypress tree twisting like black fire.

In your mind's eye you can see columns of Roman soldiers on the march, the Germanic/Scandinavian vandals marauding among the little stone villages, contests of noblemen for hegemony, the upheaval of wars and revolutions, and finally, warm contentment of a friendly people at peace among their many ghosts.

The mountains and valleys of southern France are so crowded with history that it made the Appalachians seem naked, and it struck me again, right there on I-40 West: What an adolescent country our America is.

It is good to be an adolescent among ancient cultures. We have a lot of energy, optimism, opportunity; we like ourselves, believe in our democracy and our religious values, and because of that we tend to greet the world with high-spirited friendliness, knowing foreigners will like us and eventually will want to see things our way.

In the mind's eye, when you look at the Appalachians, you see the last of the Mohicans being pushed back at first by solitary ones and twos and threes, then a trickle and finally a flood of Germans, Scots and Irish, hacking lives out of wilderness and making little settlements in the valleys.

You see in the story of these pioneers the making of another sturdy adolescent virtue: a strain of independence and self-reliance that was deeply distrustful of faraway meddling government.

We didn't really think of ourselves as a nation until we had fed 600,000 into the ghastly abattoir of civil war. We are so young that the frontier didn't officially close until 1890, the lip of the 20th century.

But boy didn't this youngster of a nation do some audacious things. With a lot of help from our friends, the French, we fought for and won our independence from England.

And before we had a navy the size of Chile's, Commodore Perry startled the Japanese, who had slept for two centuries in total isolation, when his black ships, belching smoke and bristling with cannon, sailed into Tokyo harbor and opened it to trade.

As we grew in size and muscle, we found we were as big and strong as the older men in Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia. We've done some foolish things, made some wise decisions with our strength.

In the early years of the 20th century, there was a struggle for the mind of America in world affairs, the muscular unilateralism of Teddy Roosevelt and the cooperative internationalism of Woodrow Wilson.

Roosevelt didn't think international law would protect a nation that didn't have the power to defend itself. He demonstrated that belief in his acceptance of the Japanese occupation of Korea.

TR recognized that by treaty Korea should be independent, “But Korea was itself helpless to enforce the treaty, and it was out of the question to suppose that any other nation ... would attempt to do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.”

Again, Roosevelt was little concerned by the German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg in World War I. “When giants are engaged in a death wrestle, as they reel to and fro they are certain to trample on whoever gets in their way ...”

Henry Kissinger, in his massive “Diplomacy,” writes that TR's morally ambivalent power diplomacy was discarded in favor of Wilsonian idealism, “There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries but an organized common peace.”

Kissinger writes that Wilson's “community of power” was an entirely new concept that became known as “collective security” and which touched the mainsprings of the nation's democratic and religious values.

History has judged the triumph of Wilson's vision as it was adopted by all successive presidents including Nixon and Reagan — until George W. Bush.

The neocons under Bush in an outburst of irrational exuberance mixed up TR's muscular unilateralism with a perversion of Wilsonian idealism that says we will win in Iraq because we are good, democracy is good, and we have the power to enforce our will on these desert people.

Thinking about all this as we drove up I-40, I concluded that the contentment of Provence was good, but our energetic young democracy is better. We can get off course as we have for the past few years, but the pull of our values and our system always brings us back to our senses.