The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2020

36 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL to provide them. That is, we will have trouble coming to the kinds of dispassionately considered conclusions that reflect the underlying facts, rather than the desperate hopes and shifting fears of our own imaginations. Because these conclusions will not fully account for the critical subterranean elements that are more quietly shaping our country’s future out of the limelight, they are unlikely to withstand the test of time. AWelcome Counterpoint The views of well-informed foreign observers of the United States that follow provide a welcome counterpoint in this light. Whatever their own biases or ulterior motives, they will tend not to be colored by excessive emotional proximity to their subject, or by counterintuitive disconnection and remove. Through their differing lenses, they will see patterns that we cannot. It is no sur- prise, for example, that one of the most penetrating and lastingly relevant appreciations of democratic practices in the United States was penned by a young French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Latter-day foreign observers of the United States may prove simi- larly compelling with respect to the deeper dynamics at work in our society and the sources of our own foreign policy conduct. In the Journal ’s July-August 2019 edition focused on China, retired Senior Foreign Service Officer SusanThornton cites a former Chinese leader puzzled by Americans’ fraught (to him) misapprehension of their own country’s place in the world and supposed uncertain future: “The United States has an ideal geo- graphic location, friendly neighbors, rich resources, a young and talented population, the largest and most productive economy in the world, the most well-endowed military on the planet that out- strips the next eight combined, more than 50 allies and more than 100 military bases all around the world. You should be confident. America is not in decline—it is in constant renewal.” Foreign observers of the United States can view us from a per- spective we are unable to see ourselves—from the outside. They can cast our present and future in a different kind of light, without the emotional distractions of enthusiastic wishful thinking or the fantastical imaginings of worst-case scenarios. For these and other reasons, we welcome what they have to say. n