Edwards’ announcement speech talked a great deal about restoring America to a position of moral leadership.

 

He’s talking around, but not quite actually addressing, a rapidly-developing problem that Peter David eloquently laid out in the Economist’s 2007 preview: 

It will become more obvious in the coming years. The world has an authority deficit. Authority is draining away from international institutions, from the big world powers (including the superpower) and from the nation-state itself. And though other forces, such as religion, are surging into the places the state has vacated, religions—and especially Islam—have an authority deficit of their own. Less authority is not always a bad thing. Some would say it is just the corollary of a more equal distribution of power. But it makes the world less orderly, and therefore less safe...

 

The [United Nations] Security Council’s decisions, meanwhile, go humiliatingly unheeded. In 2006 the council ordered Iran to stop enriching uranium, North Korea to give up its bomb, Sudan to stop killing civilians in Darfur and Hizbullah to disarm in Lebanon. To date, neither Iran nor North Korea nor Sudan nor Hizbullah has complied.

 

In the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union made it seem briefly possible that America’s moral and military authority might keep the peace. No longer. Moral authority? Ask a politician in Moscow, Beijing or Cairo about America’s moral authority and they will at once counter with the fiasco of Iraq, Guantánamo, “rendition” and the alleged torture of suspected terrorists. Even America’s military pre-eminence is in question. Though its armed forces will remain stronger than anyone else’s, the past three years have cruelly exposed America’s inability to squash insurgencies or put failed states back together again.

David runs down the list – the EU, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank – all international institutions that seem to be losing influence and effectiveness, as well as clarity of purpose and momentum, and succumbing to paralysis from internal divisions. Perhaps most intriguing are the forces seeking to fill the gap:

Abhorring a vacuum, newer and older forces have thrust into the spaces the state has left behind. NGOs aspire to spread good policy and governance. Religions offer the order and consolation of eternal values. The paradox is that these forces face an authority deficit themselves. Who elected the would-be defenders of the environment and liberty, such as Greenpeace and Amnesty? As for religion, even a newly self-confident Islam is hobbled by a lack of authority.

The badguys can’t muster much authority, either; they can easily destroy but they can’t create. Al-Qaeda, the remaining Taliban, the insurgents in Iraq, the Courts Union in Somalia – none of these guys can establish stable rule over much territory. They’re much better at blowing stuff up and undermining others’ attempts at establishing order and rule of law.

 

So it would be nice to, as Edwards puts it, restore America’s ‘moral authority’ – although I think that beyond Abu Ghraib, America has little to apologize for. (Or perhaps we ought to have a clearer perspective about America’s sins and those of the rest of the world.) But those who aspire to the title of “Leader of the Free World As Of January 20, 2009” ought to interrupt the Hosannas for a higher minimum wage to look at an accelerating global crisis: Can’t anybody here play the governing game?

 

Why do so few leaders in the West want to spend money on their militaries, and/or actually engage in combat in places like southern Afghanistan? Why do so many ordinary workers around the world feel that globalization is a menace, and that the solution is to build walls and withdraw from the world? Why do states from Russia to China to Pakistan to North Korea feel so free to sell the deadliest of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to dangerous regimes around the globe? And how can we entrust the United Nations to address any of these crises, when they can’t weed out sexual abuse of children from the ranks of its “peacekeepers”? Are China’s free-market authoritarianism and Putin’s iron-fisted state-run thugocracy the governing models of the future?

 

Will these big questions even come up in the 2008 primaries? Or will all the campaigns boil down to the generic trope, “I stand for true American values”?