Nachdenklicher Kommentar von James Traub in der New York Times zu der Frage, ob die Amerikaner noch an die Mission der Demokratisierung glauben, die von den Bushies so schwer beschädigt worden ist:
McCain seems to understand that the United States needs to re-earn the right to talk about its principles. The league itself, he said, would be an exercise in multilateralism, founded on “mutual respect and trust.” What’s more, he added, “America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. . . . We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured.” McCain called for the detention facility of Guantánamo Bay to be closed.
But it isn’t only our audience in the Middle East and elsewhere that has stopped paying attention after more than seven years of pious talk from the Bush administration. The American people themselves have lost faith in the language of adventurous idealism. We recognize that our heroic designs have come to grief in Iraq. We see how very little we have accomplished in the Middle East, for all our swelling rhetoric. And we have learned, to our pain, that most of the world does not look to us for guidance, does not accord us much moral authority, does not even believe that our wish to propagate democracy is sincere. The national mood is retrenchment — perhaps not cynicism or isolationism, but at least a wary and pragmatic realism. A big hangover, at home as well as abroad, awaits whoever inherits the presidency.