恐惧迷住了美国人的眼

恐惧迷住了美国人的眼

Flying into New York the other day, I got my first good look at the Freedom Tower, now known as 1 World Trade Center, the skyscraper that sits atop 9/11’s ground zero. It does, indeed, scrape the sky, topping out at a patriotic 1,776 feet. Thirteen years after 9/11, I appreciate the nationalist pride that, while terrorists can knock down our buildings, we can just build them right back up. Take that, Osama bin Laden.

几天前，我做飞机去纽约，第一次好好看了一眼“自由塔”，也就是在9·11事件原爆点的那座摩天大楼，现在叫作“世贸中心1号楼”(1 World Trade Center)。它的确是一座摩天之楼，高度恰好是洋溢着爱国情怀的1776英尺(约合541.3米)。9·11过去13年后的今天，我欣赏这种民族自豪，恐怖分子可以撞倒我们的建筑，我们可以原地再把它们建起来。傻了吧，奥萨玛·本·拉登(Osama bin Laden)。

If only the story ended there. Alas, bin Laden really did mess us up, and continues to do so. We’ve erased the ruins of the World Trade Center, but the foreign policy of fear that 9/11 instilled is still very much inside us — too much so. It remains the subtext of so much that we do in the world today, which is why it’s the subtitle of a new book by David Rothkopf, “National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear.”

要是故事就这样结束该多好。可惜，本·拉登的确把我们害惨了，至今仍未恢复。我们清理了世贸中心的废墟，但9·11事件催生的恐惧外交政策，在我们心中仍有相当的残留——可以说残留得太多了。我们今天在世界上做的许多事情，潜台词始终还是这种恐惧，这也是为什么它会出现在戴维·罗斯科普夫 (David Rothkopf)的新书《国家无安全：恐惧时代的美国领导》(National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear)的副标题里。

Much of the book is an inside look at how foreign policy was made under the two presidents since 9/11. But, in many ways, the real star of the book, the ubershaper of everything, is this “age of fear” that has so warped our institutions and policy priorities. Will it ever go away or will bin Laden be forever that gift that keeps on giving? This is the question I emailed to Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

该书用相当篇幅讲述了9·11以来两位总统制定外交政策的内幕。然而，很多方面来讲，这本书的头号明星，凌驾于诸事之上的决定性因素，是“恐惧时代”，我们的制度和政策都完全围绕它来确定什么是当务之急。这样的状况会一直持续下去吗，本·拉登会不会成为一个永远挥之不去的阴影?我在写给《外交政策》(Foreign Policy)杂志主编罗斯科普夫的邮件中提出了这个问题。

“The post-9/11 era will not be seen as a golden age in U.S. foreign policy,” he responded. “Largely, this is because 9/11 was such an emotional blow to the U.S. that it, in an instant, changed our worldview, creating a heightened sense of vulnerability.” In response, “not only did we overstate the threat, we reordered our thinking to make it the central organizing principle in shaping our foreign policy.”

“后9·11时代不会被人看作美国外交历史上的黄金时期，”他答道。“很大程度上是因为，9·11对美国是一个巨大的感情打击，大到一瞬间改变了我们的世界观，创造了一种被放大的脆弱感。”为了做出应对，“我们不仅夸大了威胁，还重新调整了我们的思维方式，让它成为塑造外交政策的核心组织原则。”

This was a mistake on many levels, Rothkopf insisted: “Not only did it produce the overreaction and excesses of the Bush years, but it also produced the swing in the opposite direction of Obama — who was both seeking to be the un-Bush and yet was afraid of appearing weak on this front himself” — hence doubling down in Afghanistan and re-intervening in Iraq, in part out of fear that if he didn’t, and we got hit with a terrorist attack, he’d be blamed.

罗斯科普夫认为，从很多层面看，这都是一个错误：“它不但造成了布什时期的过激反应和无节制的行动，还造成了奥巴马向相反方向的摆动——他试图去布什化，但同时也不希望在这方面显得孱弱”——因此就有了增兵阿富汗和重新介入伊拉克的举动，这在一定程度上是因为害怕如果不这么做，我们遭到恐怖袭击时，他就是罪人。

Fear of being blamed by the fearful has become a potent force in our politics. We’ve now spent over a decade, Rothkopf added, “reacting to fear, to a very narrow threat, letting it redefine us, and failing to rise as we should to the bigger challenges we face — whether those involved rebuilding at home, the reordering of world power, changing economic models that no longer create jobs and wealth the way they used to” or forging “new international institutions because the old ones are antiquated and dysfunctional.”

害怕被心怀恐惧的人埋怨，这在我们的政治中已经成为一股不可小觑的力量。罗斯科普夫还说，我们现在已经用了整整10年“来应对恐惧，应对微不足道的威胁，让恐惧重新定义我们，让我们在更大的挑战出现时没能去面对——不管是国内的重建、世界大国格局的改变，还是改革已经不能再像以前那样创造就业和财富的经济模式，”或建立“新的国际制度，因为旧制度已经过时和失灵。”

To put it another way, he said — and I agree with this — the focus on terrorism, combined with our gotcha politics, has “killed creative thinking” in Washington, let alone anything “aspirational” in our foreign policy. Look at the time and money Republicans forced us to spend debating whether the Benghazi, Libya, consulate attack was a terrorist plot or a spontaneous event — while focusing not a whit on the real issue: what a bipartisan failure our whole removal of Libya’s dictator turned out to be, what we should learn from that and how, maybe, to fix it.

换句话说，他认为——我也同意——对恐怖主义的关注，再结合我们的拆台政治学，已经扼杀了华盛顿的“创造性思维”，更不要奢望在我们的外交政策中有什么“志向远大”的地方。看看共和党人迫使我们花了多少时间和金钱，用于讨论利比亚班加西领馆遇袭是一个恐怖主义阴谋，还是偶发性事件——对真正迫切的问题却毫不关心：我们推翻利比亚独裁统治的行动，究竟造成了多么严重的两党瘫痪，我们从中能得到什么教训，也许还可以想想如何解决。

I have sympathy for President Obama having to deal with this mess of a world, where the key threats come from crumbling states that can be managed only by rebuilding them at a huge cost, with uncertain outcomes and dodgy partners. Americans don’t want that job. Yet these disorderly states create openings for low-probability, high-impact terrorism, where the one-in-a-million lucky shot can really hurt us. No president wants to be on duty when that happens either. Yet many more Americans were killed in their cars by deer last year than by terrorists. I don’t think Obama has done that badly navigating all these contradictions. He has done a terrible job explaining what he is doing and connecting his restraint with any larger policy goals at home or abroad.

我对奥巴马总统抱有同情，因为他不得不应对这个乱糟糟的世界，在这个世界里，威胁都来自那些摇摇欲坠的国家，只有付出巨大的代价帮助它们重建，才能控制这些威胁，但所有的结果都充满不确定性，伙伴们也都并不可靠。美国人又不想把这些事揽到自己头上。然而，那些失序的国家为概率低、影响大的恐怖主义制造了机会，尽管这样的行动真正伤害到我们的概率只有百万分之一，但是也没有哪位总统想要在这种事情发生时当政。然而，去年因为鹿而出车祸丧生的美国人，都比被恐怖分子杀害的人多很多。我不认为奥巴马在应对这些矛盾时的表现有那么糟糕。但是他的确没有很好地解释自己的行为，也没有让人们看到，他的克制与内政和外交上更宏大的政策目标有什么关系。

Argues Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Harvard Business School and author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” our overreliance on fencing, so to speak, since 9/11 has distracted us from building resilience the way we used to, by investing in education, infrastructure, immigration, government-funded research and rules that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness.

著有《不可或缺：领导者真正发挥作用的时候》(Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter)一书的哈佛商学院教授高塔姆·穆昆达(Gautam Mukunda)说，9·11之后我们过于强调把自己围起来(姑且如此形容)，以至于我们无法像以往那样，通过投资教育、基础设施、移民、政府资助的研究，以及那些鼓励冒险但劝阻草率的规则，让我们更有韧性。