Restoring U.S. Legitimacy Abroad
Speaking before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Thursday, Josef Joffe,
publisher-editor of Die Zeit, said the next president must work to restore U.S. legitimacy abroad.
• “Next January, we’ll have a new president. And by ‘we,’ I mean America and the world,” he said. Despite the declining dollar and increasing trade deficit, the U.S. president “is still the mightiest person on earth, and its country is still number one,” he noted. The United States remains the “default power,” he said, and no other nation is poised to take its place in that role.
• Joffe cited heightened attention being paid internationally to the U.S. presidential campaign. He said he cannot recall a time in recent history “when the world has taken a more intense interest in the primary, when they knew down in Hamburg and Hanover what a superdelegate was.”
• Joffe stressed that legitimacy is “just another word for getting others to do your bidding without having to bribe, blackmail and brutalize them,” he said. Because Saddam Hussein “hadn’t attacked anybody,” and there were no weapons of mass destruction, Joffe said, the war led to diminished U.S. legitimacy abroad. Joffe says though the United States is winning the war in Iraq, the war has run “counter to the interests of most nations.”
• Both Barack Obama and John McCain understand “that power has to be tempered by obligation and by prudence,” he said. The next president must begin to restore U.S. legitimacy by returning to the country’s tradition as a “default power” providing public goods to the world.
