Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

After a staggering display of mush, muddle and miscues by the world’s lone superpower, a rogue nation appears ready to give up the chemical weapons it supposedly never had. Without a shot’s being fired. This, of course, is a miserable failure in the eyes of the gaseous class, amateur hour in real time, because, well — it wasn’t planned.

How can you have 10 days that shook the world when it was never gamed out, move by move, by the pedigreed cardinals of geopolitical intrigue? The answer is in the very thing that my colleague-for-a-day, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, decried in his self-serving opinion piece on Thursday — American exceptionalism.

It was little noticed, but President Obama made a point of highlighting the special burden of “the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” He used those words twice — once in deciding to give Congress a say on striking Syria, and again in the Tuesday night speech pleading his case.

That democracy, in all its messy, inconsistent, incoherent cacophony, was there for the world to watch in the September standoff. Some of it was pigs-fly-thrilling — hard-right conservatives joining voices with peacenik libs. Some of it was comic — John McCain playing poker on his cellphone while Congress mulled a military strike. Much of it was appalling. This is what happens when you let 535 elected representatives have an actual role in foreign policy.



The net result, accidental or not, is that Syria is no longer just an American problem. They say they will give up the poison gas that, wink, wink, was never used. The principle, as Obama said, “that with modest effort and risk we stop children from being gassed to death,” is there on the table for a world that preferred to look the other way. And, added bonus: the neocon warriors are gone, homeless in both parties. All of this is a hugely positive leap from where we were a week, a month, or a year ago.

But outcomes don’t really matter to those obsessed by who won and who lost, those who see all politics as up-and-down nonsense instead of a clash of ideas with real consequences. So this past week has to be cast in the tired terms of the daily struggle for sound-bite supremacy. It’s a debacle. A blunder. A humiliation. “This rudderless diplomacy,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican Party, “has embarrassed America on the world stage.”

You want embarrassment? Just consider some of the public statements of Republicans in the last two weeks. The worst stunt was when three of the most empty-head members of Congress, Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert and Steve King, went to Egypt to praise a military coup against an elected democratic regime. They compared a general who authorized mass shootings of protesters and sweeping roundups of dissident voices to George Washington.

“We are with you, and we encourage you,” said Bachmann, looking like a hostage as she read a statement on state-run television in Cairo.

Senator Rand Paul, the Tea Party Republican who wants to be president, initially expressed indirect support for his fellow ophthalmologist, Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian dictator, he noted, was on the side of Christians, so maybe we should think twice about attacking him. A week later he said Assad deserved to die if he gassed those kids. Now, he says, the president “is asking us to be allies with Al Qaeda.”

Obama is asking no such thing; he’s calling for global censure, backed by the threat of military strikes, against a government that kills its own citizens with poison gas. But in one very dark and lonely corner stand the politicians who most want to pick a side and go to war — the last of the neocons, McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham. They are in the party of Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann and Reince Priebus.

It would be nice to think that what happened this week was all part of a secret plan, an outgrowth of an idea that in fact was presented to Putin at the economic summit in St. Petersburg. But there’s little evidence of that. Obama, the most cautious of presidents, opted for diplomacy on the fly and in public — something you’re never supposed to do. He opted to give every armchair secretary of state a say.

“If this were a tennis match, it would be the umpire shouting, ‘Advantage Putin!’” said Paul, still trying to find that lasting zinger. But wasn’t the senator from Kentucky on the side of Putin, because Putin’s on the side of Assad, who is on the side of the Christians? (But also backed by Iran.)

In truth, it’s burden Putin. He has to back his words that he’ll broker a deal to get Syria to give up its chemical stockpile. And having stepped to center stage, he has to start acting more like a global citizen, instead of a thug with convenient petro pals. And it’s burden world, in that the 188 other signatories to the treaty banning chemical weapons can no longer leave all the heavy lifting to the United States.

In the mess of democracy, the stew of free speech, the best ideas are supposed to rise to the top. That’s the theory, taught to schoolchildren since Thomas Jefferson’s day. For now, the best idea emerged — a path to getting poison gas out of the hands of a mass killer, without United States military action. And if Obama blundered into it, if he looks uncertain, weak or waffling , his heart and mind genuinely troubled, so be it. That’s what happens when the world’s oldest constitutional democracy lives up to its title.