Der stille Amerikaner

Just as in Locarno, the idealism and the foregone hopes of the past continue to pull me. Reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, fittingly in German translation, on the upper deck of Lufthansa’s Boeing 747-8 “Schleswig-Holstein” as we leave the European continent behind.

Torbjörn Elensky, writing in Svenska Dagbladet, put it well: in Greene’s novel, the old empire’s man is the British cynic – worn down, clear-eyed – while the new empire sends Pyle: Harvard-educated, crew-cut, catastrophically sincere. Pyle does not cause harm despite his good intentions. He causes it because of them. He is, as Elensky notes, the inverse of Mephistopheles: where Goethe’s devil does good through the evil he pursues, Pyle does evil through the good he strives for.

What reads differently now than it did in 1955 – is the endpoint of that trajectory.

A couple of weeks ago, Fareed Zakaria reminded his viewers of the Iraqi Revolt of 1920 – how an overextended Britain spent the equivalent of its entire education budget fighting a peripheral war, losing a thousand soldiers, to little long-term gain. Empires rarely fall in a single dramatic moment; more often, they dissipate through a long series of misallocated priorities – each perhaps defensible in isolation, each compounding the last. What is lost is not only blood and treasure, but the futures deferred – the social investments never made.

The pattern feels familiar now, as Trump’s “little excursion” into Iran unfolds and the familiar arguments circulate. What is striking is that these arguments are no longer even dressed in Pyle’s language. There is no talk of a mission, no third force, no bright theory imported from a think tank. What has replaced the quiet American’s idealism is something Fowler, Greene’s narrator, might not have anticipated: war as entertainment, or even as rambling absurdity, with the White House publishing endless memes inspired by Call of Duty and Gladiator while promising different speculative timelines to satisfy the stock market.

Greene’s novel ends before Pyle fully understands what he has done. The reader understands before he does. Perhaps that is the most unsettling thing about rereading it now, flying west, the continent shrinking behind us: the sense that we are no longer at the beginning of the story, but that we may already be well past the point where understanding changes anything at all.