The Obliviousness of American Exceptionalism

When the U.S. can’t be bothered to pay much attention to large swathes of the world for decades, it cannot expect to find receptive audiences and willing partners.

Damien Cave reports on China’s growing influence in the Pacific:

Many Pacific Island nations do not welcome another age of great-power competition. As Matthew Wale, the opposition leader in the Solomons, said in a recent interview: “We don’t want to be the grass trampled over by the elephants.”

But what they do want, and what China seems better at providing right now, is consistent engagement and capacity building.

The framing of the article makes this into a “race for influence,” and the U.S. has been losing this race because it has barely been making the effort to run. It is much the same story that we hear from Southeast Asia and across much of Africa and even in Latin America: U.S. engagement is poor and inadequate to the needs of other countries, and China makes significant inroads mostly just by showing up and investing. Having neglected entire regions and continents for decades while it waged pointless wars in Asia, the U.S. cannot magically increase its influence in all these places to make up for lost time.