The New York Review of Books - October 3, 2013
When I was The Guardian‘s Washington correspondent in the
1990s, fellow members of the British press corps would joke about a
specific genre of story our news desks back home could not resist. TWA’s
I called them: Those Wacky Americans. Typically, these were matters of
no national consequence, such as the self-styled “meanest sheriff in
America,” humiliating jail inmates by making them wear pink underwear,
or the strange world of Utah polygamists. But sometimes national
politics fell into the TWA category too: the 1995 and 1996 shutdowns of
the US government, for example, which closed the Statue of Liberty to
visitors and, improbably, deprived veterans of their benefits.
“We almost watched it as a spectator sport,” recalls Robin Niblett,
director of London’s Chatham House (more formally known as the Royal
Institute of International Affairs). “It was ‘Bloody hell, what are
those Americans up to now?’”
This time around, however, with the US government shutdown again,
there is not just bemusement in capitals across Europe and Asia, but a
growing sense of angst. If the current deadlock extends to October 17,
and a congressional refusal to raise the debt ceiling triggers a US
default, the impact will be instant and international. What for the Tea
Party caucus will be a gesture about excessive federal spending, will to
the rest of the world be an act of sabotage inflicted on the global
economic system.
Even before things reach that drastic pass, the current display of
self-induced paralysis has many asking, If the United States cannot
solve its own problems, how can it help solve the world’s? “Is Uncle Sam
ready for assisted suicide?” asked
one London columnist, unable to believe that the nation still routinely
deemed the world’s sole superpower has to send its own government into
hibernation because it cannot agree to pay its bills.
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