Could this have been The New York Times’s most flagrantly comic headline of the year?

“Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’”

The article’s author, London bureau chief Mark Landler, develops a quote he gleaned from a veteran of the Obama State Department. “This is going to make the region extremely nervous. It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In control:

1. An often fleeting and frequently unstable feeling of mastery felt by people who find themselves in situations they are familiar with which leads them to believe they understand all the parameters of the situation.
2. An increasingly unjustified feeling of mastery of other people and nations by politicians in Washington, DC, the effect of decades of blindness to cultural differences and the deceitful impression that fear of a dominant power is an indicator of admiration, respect and even love.

Contextual note

Analysts of cultural differences have often pointed out that in US political and media culture, one of the core values is control, the idea that things should never be left to unknown influences. It links with another core value: self-reliance. Most of the world’s cultures leave considerable room for chance or fatality in the way events play out. Inch’Allah is often evoked outside the Muslim world. 

In the US, citizens learn from an early age that they are on their own in their quest to control the environment and the events they may be involved in. Even if team effort is encouraged, the focus of groups is not camaraderie but to work together to ensure their collective control.

Landers’s article provides some context for the helplessness expressed in its headline. “For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.”

Without being disrespectful, I can’t fail to find this laughable for two reasons. The first is Landers’s assumption that there ever was any hope of being “in control” of a situation that has been consistently controlled by one voice alone, that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second is his phrase, “diplomatic efforts.” Many of us have noticed that diplomacy is now a long-forgotten art in the US. The US no longer “engages” in diplomacy. It imposes what it calls diplomacy. What that means is that it states a position, usually framing it as an inviolable principle, and then expects others to fall into line. But when someone like Netanyahu refuses to fall into line, Washington prefers looking helpless.

The fact that an NYT bureau chief can express surprise and disappointment at Biden’s loss of control is quite simply comic. I won’t even begin to cite the impressive number of perfectly sane people who refused to believe that a policy characterized by sending messages of mild disagreement to an increasingly violent and visibly unhinged regime had any chance of producing a different result. They all pointed out that a simple phone call informing his good friend Bibi that the US would be obliged to cut off support for a war that was clearly already out of anyone’s control has been possible for months, but never attempted.

A pattern emerged even in the early days of the conflict. Washington offers warnings about not going too far or not attempting particular acts, such as the bombing of Rafah. US media then proudly trumpets the warnings to show that the Biden administration was capable of taking a moral position, at least rhetorically. But when those warnings produced no result other than new atrocities, the White House and the media would express their disappointment and hope that such crimes would not be repeated. The Biden administration projected to the world the simple message that it was never in control.

Historical note

Since its founding less than 250 years ago, the new American democracy has enjoyed the privilege of sensing that it is in control of most of the things it has had to deal with. As the sole Europeans inhabiting a stretch of continent that extended westward to the Pacific, the British colonists in control of their towns, farms, plantations and waterways along the east coast of the US understood the opportunity that awaited them. It was based, paradoxically, on their belief, formally stated, that “all men are created equal,” but completed by the sentiment that some groups of those men are destined to dominate others. Before obtaining their independence, the discomfort they felt with the fact that the government in London was constraining their ambition turned out to be a major factor fueling their desire to revolt and break the bonds of dependence on Britain.

The local populations that inhabited the continent before the arrival of Europeans clearly lacked the advanced level of economic and technological culture that had already begun to define modern Europe, and England in particular. The indigenous tribes simply could not compete with the ever more resourceful Anglo-Saxons, who had mastered the science of “prosperity” through organization, industry, technology and personal ambition. The European Americans were paragons of what historian Jan de Vries called the “industrious revolution” that preceded and continued to accompany the industrial revolution that was already underway in England.

Once they had achieved independence, westward expansion began. It later took on its own separate historical status when the population viewed it as “manifest destiny.” By the middle of the 20th century, some began expressing their concern with the “closing of the frontier,” which of course provoked President John F Kennedy’s youthful administration in 1961 to evoke a “New Frontier.” The spirit of expansion with a view to control, validated by a Calvinist God who instituted manifest destiny has been a permanent feature of the US political mindset. This should help observers today to understand why the eastward expansion of NATO, though initially resisted by many European leaders and dramatically opposed by Russia, seems to everyone in Washington totally natural and probably predestined.

The Strategy Bridge, a foreign policy think tank, in a 2021 paper cited a commission of former government officials who, in 1996, “conducted a study of American vital interests” that listed five goals:

“(1) prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attacks on the United States; (2) prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia; (3) prevent the emergence of a hostile major power on U.S. borders or in control of the seas; (4) prevent the catastrophic collapse of major global systems; and (5) ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

The breadth of those goals expressed the view of the hegemon feeling alone on the stage in what is now referred to as “the unipolar moment.” With the Soviet empire gone, Washington finally felt in total control. The ultimate promise of the culture was fulfilled. All would be well in the world. Francis Fukuyama even called it the “end of history.”  

For two decades, an attempt to control the politics and economy of the Middle East led to slowly unfolding disappointment, when US leaders failed to manage the controls. Subsequent events in eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating today that, despite constant resolutions and promises to regain control of declining military and economic fortunes, the capacity of the US to influence other regions of the world in any other way than provoking conflicts that inevitably go out of control has disappeared. We see this in the erosion of the once effective arsenal of soft power that instilled a positive perception of the US and its culture across the globe. Now it becomes visible with every act that announces to the world that the combined force of Washington’s armies, spies, financial domination, technology, media and social networks cannot even “ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.