American Exceptionalism

Books read this week: Clear and Present Danger (Tom Clancy) 4/10

The UK does not have a written constitution, and I often find when consuming American media, such as Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, that as a result my perspective on political questions is very different from  what the author assumes it will be; my first instinct when confronted with a policy is not to ask "is it constitutional?" but rather "is it right?". There is a very clear (to the author, at any rate) distinction made within this book between secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country without full congressional approval (BAD!) and secretly sending soldiers to murder foreign nationals in another country with congressional approval (GOOD!). Really, I'm hard pressed to see the difference.

Of course, when reading Clancy's books one either needs one's mental filters up or to assume that the books are set in some kind of alternate reality where, for example, Fidel Castro is actually Satan himself, and the IRA is composed entirely of doctrinaire Maoists who receive all their funding from Moscow. I find the best way to deal with it is, just like when watching 24, to say that there are two teams, both of which are made up of nasty, evil people, but, for the sake of having someone to root for, we're going to pick one and cheer them on; much like I might pick a side when reading about the Punic wars, just for fun*. As long as one can make those adjustments, there's a halfway decent page turner there.

The most interesting thing, for me, about this book (and Clancy's other work) is the lack of perspective; the total inability to understand why the rules (or in fact any rules) should apply to American foreign policy. Thus the huge amount of space in this book devoted to whether the President's actions contravene US law, but no attention at all is paid to the contempt with which he is treating international law (or, in fact, elementary human decency).


*Hannibal FTW!