US power and responsibility abroad - 13 March 1998

I'm sitting up in bed on Thursday morning, unfolding the paper and sipping my tea and, as Damon Runyon would have said, wanting no part of any trouble with any guy or doll, when a four-column headline gets up and startles me because it's about a place I never heard of and yet the heading and the sub-heading assume I know all about it.

"Threatened Red Cross pull workers out of besieged province!, dateline Prekaz, if that's how it's pronounced. I climb out of bed and creep into my study and take out the encyclopaedia. The encyclopaedia which, by the way, is I hear is going out of business – the book business, that is. But then, books are going out of business. The encyclopaedia, all 24 volumes, will be available on a CD-rom and you can get all the information you seek, if you're nimble enough with your mouse.

Well this remote, unknown place, where it says scores have been killed and thousands have fled to the winter wilderness, Kosovo, that's the name of the besieged place. I look it up in the encyclopaedia. It's not there, not as a separate entry.

But I wade through the history of the recently-named country Yugoslavia and eventually learn that Kosovo is a province where the Serbians established their medieval kingdoms before the Turks pushed them to the north. It mentions what perhaps should come first in any mention of these belligerent Balkan countries, that about six languages are spoken by different peoples and, like the Balkans since time immemorial, they're fighting to decide who, which, is the ethnic minority.

Why do I bring this up? Because a Serbian professor says it's all the Americans' fault. He doesn't want to fight, but he's furious at being outnumbered by so many ethnic Albanians. People don't have pensions, the Americans have frozen our money.

Does any member of the class remember or has heard tell of a forgotten English statesman who asked aloud, unfortunately in the House of Commons, what sort of responsibility Britons could possibly have for a remote little country called Czechoslovakia?

At that time, 60 years ago, most Britons were well acquainted with all sorts of remote and quite often unpronounceable places, provided they lay within the British Empire. I was riffling, the other day, through a squirrel's hideaway of papers, letters, faded brown photos, the refuse of a happily-spent boyhood and I came on a map of the world which at some time I must have pinned up in my attic bedroom.

It was the standard map we were expected to learn geography from. A third of the map was coloured red, that was the part we were supposed to know about. It was the one-third, or more, of the physical globe that we owned, according to my first history master.

A cynical soldier, returned comparatively unscratched from four appalling years in the trenches, he used to point to some distant, massive province or a sliver of an island and say, "This is another part of our proud empire that we annexed in the natives' interest".

I knew about Bangkok before I could accurately pin Berlin on a map. Ceylon was where our tea came from and if, like me, you were a banana freak, you well knew what was the tastiest export both of Jamaica and the Canary Islands.

But Czechoslovakia? Perhaps not to most of us in 1938 quite as remote as it evidently was for Mr Chamberlain, but then foreign affairs was not his bag. Yet, Czechoslovakia was the immediate cause of the Second World War. How about a name and place remoter still to most Britons, Bosnia-Herzegovina and that, no less, was the cause of the First World War.

By the time I'd learned the name and location of some of those remote lands I'd also learned on my first trip, a walking trip, to Europe, I learned to my astonishment that Britons and the British Empire were not universally revered.

In the first year or two of my time in this country I remember a hale, blustery tycoon whom I later got to know and like, turning purple in the face when he upbraided me for not giving India her freedom. I told him, I never owned it and was not even a collateral relation to Clive.

During the Second World War we used to say, it's really very complicated, total independence is very unlikely and didn't the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, memorably say, I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Proud words, defining exactly what, in fact, he came to do.

Well, just as Englishmen felt, way back, when Americans blamed them one and all for the oppressions of the Empire – there was a song, by the way, very popular here, banned by the BBC in the 1930s, it was called Bang, Bang, Here Come the British – today I notice that Americans sitting in the evening and meaning no part of any harm to any guy or doll, get challenged or chivvied about Bosnia or Iraq or Beijing.

"Why are you protesting to the Russians for sending weapons to Iran?" Either their eyes glaze over with weariness or they stifle a burbling protest. Tomorrow there'll be another headline and another remote town or province somewhere for which the world will assume the Americans ought to be responsible.

Ever since the end of the Second War, every American president has warned the country about lapsing back into the isolationism of the 1920s and '30s, when the Senate refused to let this country join the League of Nations.

Every president has anticipated or later echoed, if in not quite such all-embracing rhetoric, John Kennedy's ringing inaugural sentence, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty". Probably the rashest promise ever made by any President.

In fact it was true then and made abundantly truer, later, that neither America nor any other country in history for that matter, would support any friend, pay any price or meet even the hardships of foregoing a motor car and a weekly baseball game, let alone fight any foe to come to the aid of 43 nations to whom this promise had been made by treaty. Vietnam was the one debt paid and heaven knows, enough.

I think the president's astonishing popularity these days springs from a special sympathy for him in his present ordeal. Here he is, being drowned in the daily outpourings of the media gone berserk over the White House intern and the woman from Little Rock, long ago, and he confessed the other day that sometimes he feels like a punching bag.

And yet, he has to go on gamely pretending that he's high and dry and cheerful while he hands out orders about Bosnia, contrives a trade trip to China which must turn a blind eye to their prison labour camps. Every day he must decide which terrorist dictator to embrace and which to deplore and all the while he must wonder, as some of us have wondered, how long those 30-odd thousand troops and the men and women on the battleships and planes and two aircraft carriers are going to stay watching a chuckling Saddam without working up a grumble short of mutiny.

Americans might well say, as I did about India and Burma and other places, I didn't promise neither to free the Croats or to save Haiti and Nicaragua for democracy and pay any price and bear any burden. That was said by a young man, he'd now be 80, who would promise anything to get to be president.

An old diplomat mused the other day, it's a proud time to be President of the United States. But it's not a good time and sooner or later, when our resources and our fighting strength are overstretched, as in the later days of the Roman Empire, the question the country's going to ask itself is, am I my brother's keeper?

So far, Congress keeps saying, look, we can't be the policemen of the world. But then, when the pinch comes, they act as if it was their duty.

And now, as if all this weren't enough, the next morning's headline was bigger still and more scary. An asteroid is hovering over the earth and might brush it on a Thursday, we hear from the leading astrophysicist of the United States.

It's about a mile in diameter, could set whole continents on fire and drown the others in a massive tidal wave. But, says this expert, it would not necessarily wipe out the human race. I like "not necessarily". Also, he tells us, there is no immediate cause for alarm. The Thursday he has in mind is Thursday 26 October 2028, when I'll be 120.

This reassurance reminds me of the late, great Robert Benchley's comment on a similarly frightening scientific piece he'd read, about what a famous eye specialist called the drift to one eye. This doctor said human eyes are gradually growing closer together till the day will come when there'll be just one big eye in the middle of the face. But it will take some years for this unpleasant change to take place. Countless ages, was the way the good doctor put it.

But, as Mr Benchley noted, there'd be a disagreeable period of narrowing of the bridge of the nose with the eyes getting closer and closer every day and, warned Benchley, that might very well come in our time. My eyes are so close together as it is, I bet I win. I bet I'm the first one-eyed man in the world.

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