After I retired some years ago, I got into the habit of tuning in to U.S. Presidents' State of the Union messages. I guess I never thought I had time before. I suppose it makes me a better-informed, and therefore better, citizen to watch them, yet I sometimes wonder if this is a worthwhile way to use the time. These talks, no matter who the speaker or what party he represents, have become too formulaic, too laden with a laundry list of proposals that will seldom be implemented, to be a meaningful guide to the nation's "state," less still to its future.
Obama's SOTU this year was cut from the same cloth, so it was only natural for my mind to wander a bit.
As a diplomat, I spent several years in what until recently was known as "Yugoslavia." At the time I was first assigned to that country, Josip Broz Tito was still alive and well. The conventional wisdom was that only Tito himself could hold this pastiche of different mini-nations together in a (somewhat) cohesive whole, and most observers were concerned about chaos after his death.
Tito died. The country did not fall apart. It survived Tito by roughly a decade. In hindsight, I think it's clear now that Yugoslavia wasn't held together by any kind of internal force (Tito pulling strings and cracking heads), but by an external pressure -- the mutual fear of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians and others of being dominated, if not annexed outright, by the Soviet Union. The resolution of that threat, as the Soviet Union caved in on itself, led directly and quickly to the breakup of Yugoslavia into its component parts.
Back to the SOTU: President Obama's talk really spotlighted the increasing partisanship in our political system, the deadlock that prevails, and the growing divergence of view about fundamental precepts of government, economics, and even defense. This all began in the early 1990s. Could it be that our own unity, somewhat like Yugoslavia's -- albeit less directly and at greater remove -- was in part a function of the external threat that the USSR represented to us?
I don't mean to suggest that the United States is about to break up into a half-dozen or more different countries; we are, I hope, a long way from that. Yet the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship between our current political mood and the end of the Cold War is a tantalizing thought. A book needs to be written, and no doubt someday will, about the global consequences of the Soviet meltdown.
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