In Defense of America (2 page)
The Case for the Defense
The case I make for the defense has three parts. First, in chapter 2, on the phenomenon of rising anti-American feeling, and in chapter 3, on American values, I argue that the United States’ critics fail to acknowledge the breadth of the values which they hold in common, and which are set out in the founding texts of America. Above all, they ignore the ambition and the success of the American project itself: persuading so many people who are so different from one another to live peaceably together under one government. At a time when Europe’s only apparent solution to ethnic conflict is to divide countries into microstates — the perilous choice of Kosovo, the longed for but unlikely fate of Scotland and Belgium — this is a profound contribution to civilization.
Second, in its economy and culture (the target of chapter 4), the critics give too little credit to the benefit to their own well-being from the United States’ development of liberal capitalism, capital markets, and competition policy, and the innovation and economic strength America has derived from that. They ignore the differences between their economies and America’s, as well as the peculiar costs the Kyoto treaty against global warming would have imposed on America, for example, to the detriment of their own countries’ economic growth. They type out their criticism on laptops run by American software, without acknowledging that their lives have been made healthier and longer by the advances of American medicine.
A point I particularly want to make is that for all these achievements, it is easy to overstate American cultural and corporate influence, ignoring the signs of the fragility of these empires, from Coca-Cola to Hollywood, which critics presume are eternal. It is also easy to overlook the constraints America’s own federalism imposes on these supposed corporate titans. Indeed, in developing cellular phone coverage and banking across state lines, for example, the United States lagged behind other countries because of the freedom it gave the states to set their own rules.
Third, in foreign policy (chapters 5 and 6), I argue that critics are too easily diverted by the horrendous mistakes of Iraq, the repellent expediency of Guantánamo, and the unconsidered promotion of democracy, and ignore the fact that American foreign policy is still, on the whole, a defense of shared values. They skate over its central role in designing the laws and institutions which have governed the world for half a century. It is too easy now to take the disintegration of the Soviet Union for granted and to resent the preeminence which this has bestowed on the United States without giving it credit for helping bring about that change.
The Indefensible
I have no intention of defending the indefensible: the mistakes the United States has made and the high-handedness with which it has often pursued its aims. Not many in Central America or, now, in the Arab world, with reason, are impelled to take a generous look at the supposed imperatives of its recent foreign adventures. Iraq, as I discuss in chapter 7, was an ugly mistake. America failed to understand the unique conditions of its own democracy and forgot how laborious and painful were its own attempts to write a constitution and organize a federation. There is, of course, no way to make light of misjudgments that have led to the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis. The best that can be said is that the intention of removing a dictator was compatible with the values on which the United States is founded, although, as is now painfully clear, its unthinking promotion of democracy can produce unexpected and violent effects which may also conflict with its struggles against terrorism.
No defense at all can be made for Guantánamo Bay, the subject of chapter 8. Both the military trials the administration has constructed to try some of the prisoners and the principle of indefinite detention without trial for those not charged are offenses against American principles of justice and equality.
The question is whether this will be so sustained by successive generations and administrations that it comes to seem the settled view of Americans, and must then be taken as representing the values of the country. But at this point, as I argue, we can still hope Guantánamo represents only the worst kind of expediency after the shock of September 11. Europeans tend to comfort themselves by saying that President Bush’s successors will be nothing like him, but this is a self-deception which ignores how much his administration drew on the historic themes of American policy. Yet you would have to take a very bleak view of the United States’ commitment to its own principles to say that its actions in Iraq and Guantánamo should erase the record of half a century, as well as the prospect that it will continue to uphold quintessentially American principles in the future.
Be Careful What You Wish For
The second tragedy of Iraq, besides the deaths and turmoil inflicted on that country, is that America has been distracted and deterred from engagement in regional problems where it would have had an enormously valuable effect. That is true of the wider Middle East and Iran, and in the incomplete transformation of Eastern and Central Europe. To recoil from American intervention after Iraq is to throw out the best along with the worst.
Those who dream of a more muted America, one “back in its box,” and who feel a sense of satisfaction at the dollar’s fall, fail to imagine what the world without a strong United States would be like. The threat to the United States is likely to come not from being overtaken but, as I argue in chapter 9, from the challenge by China, Russia, and to a lesser extent Iran to the system of international laws and treaties which the United States helped create, and which they are skeptical has much to offer them.
Those who fear an imperial America skate too easily over challenges to the United States at home, where it will be absorbed in trying to unite a soaring population under its founding principles. Its population, which has just breached the 300 million mark, is projected to rise to 420 million by 2050, half because of people living longer, half because of immigration, most of that Hispanic. No surprise that immigration became a headline issue of the 2008 presidential election campaign. The prospect of social transformation on that scale would be incomprehensible in many European countries. The change, which will leave the United States with the huge advantage of one of the youngest populations in the developed world, will also surely take it into a more introverted phase, as it wrestles with accommodating so many more people, drawing its attention away from Europe and toward itself. Those who wish for less of America’s attention may well get just that.
Inevitably, in Europe, this argument will be taken —from the title onward —as a neoconservative tract, and one in the dying days of the movement at that. That isn’t what I have meant. Instead, I intend this as a rebalancing, an analysis of what is indeed different about America as well as an assertion of its liberal values.
The word “liberal” perilously changes meaning across the Atlantic. I use it in its classic English sense of asserting the importance of individual rights and freedoms, and the importance of challenging overbearing government. Those principles are too easily forgotten in Europe in the face of terrorist threats, and even in the UK, with its long tradition of that philosophy. As David Miliband, Gordon Brown’s foreign secretary, has said, the left has become sheepish and subdued in talking about democratic ideals.
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This is an argument for why the left, as well as the right, can defend America.
For Americans, I intend this book to be three things: It is a portrait of how the United States is seen abroad after Iraq, and of why it is so easily misunderstood. It is an account of the dangers to the United States of the new conception it has of its role since the heady end of the Cold War and the shock of 9/11. It is also, as I suggest in chapter 10, a notion of what Americans might do about it, should they care to try.
UNLOVED, OR SIMPLY LOATHED
The invasion of Iraq brought to a head a new wave of anti-American feeling around the world. This is true even in Europe, in countries which should be America’s allies, and that is mainly what I address here.
Of course, Europe is not alone. But the violent expression of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world is a different phenomenon, even if some of the provocations on which it draws are the same. Arab states’ willingness to blame the United States for their own deep disappointment in nationalism and socialism, and for their own devastating failure to develop, has been extensively chronicled, in particular by Bernard Lewis, a renowned authority on the Islamic world, with a pessimistic cast that is hard to counter.
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So has their revulsion at the cloud of “Americanness” which some in those societies feel is engulfing them. This is not to say that those who see the United States as the Great Satan are entirely a lost cause (and the great fondness for Americans among many Iranians, compared at least to their Arab neighbors, is easily overlooked in the United States), but those opponents are not quickly going to be converted. Nor are those in Latin America, inspired by a long tradition of populism and of deriding their northern neighbor, and who have found in the presidency of George W. Bush invaluable ammunition.
But if any region is going to be the natural ally of the United States, it is Europe, yet anti-American attitudes are rising there. Those feelings of distaste and distrust have a history going back to the birth of America, and they are not entirely irrational; they have often been prompted by real provocation. But in some countries —France most articulately of all —they have become intertwined with a sense of national identity. To act alongside the United States can be seen as national treason and can be political suicide.
In cartoon terms, the European charge is that Americans are fat, trigger-happy Christian fundamentalists, opposed to abortion, wedded to the death penalty, and determined to drive the largest cars on the planet with some of the cheapest gasoline. A lengthy survey by the
New York Times Magazine
caught that antagonistic mood at the end of the 1990s, before the transformation of 9/11, when the United States was envied and resented for its size, expansiveness, and confidence. In Britain, Marina Warner, the author and literary critic, in an essay which summed up the well-spoken revulsion of some British intellectuals for the United States, surmised that “Bigness still defines America, but a bigness grown pillowy and flaccid and fluffy and fat like baby flesh . . . part of a generalized cult of childishness, fake infantilism.”
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But more than that (as some French academics have made distinguished careers of showing), some find it profoundly satisfying to portray America as a “non-nation,” without proper history or culture, because to attack it is to strengthen their sense of their own.
Josef Joffe, the German cultural critic, in a
New York Times Magazine
essay entitled “America the Inescapable,” described how Europe has long seen the United States as a “model to abhor. . . . America stood for capitalism at its cruelest, social and racial injustice . . . and cultural decadence. And of course for ruthless imperialism masked by self-serving, moralizing cant.”
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These feelings are deeply ambivalent, of course, mixed with fondness, aspiration, and envy. As President Sarkozy put it, “The French listen to Madonna, just as they used to love listening to Elvis and Sinatra; they go to the movies to see
Miami Vice
and enjoy watching
The Maltese Falcon
or
Schindler’s List
for a second or third time. That’s the truth. The young people wear American jeans and love American burgers and pizza.”
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For that matter, more British high school students apply to American universities every year. As I discuss in chapter 4, the United States’ worldwide influence was not achieved at gunpoint but because of the desire of people for American culture and exports. All the same, the attitudes are here to stay; to dismiss them as solely a reaction to President Bush and Iraq is to miss both their roots and the reasons why they are strengthening.
The New Mood, Almost Everywhere
The new European disenchantment shows up clearly in two surveys which tracked the entrenchment of anti-American attitudes across the world. The Pew Research Center in June 2007 found that America’s image had declined since 2002 in most parts of the world, including “among the publics of many of America’s oldest allies.” Unsurprisingly, it found that the “United States’ image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia.” But it also noted that just 30 percent of Germans had a positive view of the United States, and although Britain managed 51 percent, that figure was “inching lower.” In France, 60 percent disliked the United States; so did a majority in Spain. The worst was Turkey, one of America’s most important allies, where 83 percent loathed America and only 9 percent were in favor.
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“New Europe” —Poland, the Czech Republic, and the other countries released from the former Soviet bloc —was more positive than the old heart of the European Union, but even there, support was slipping.
It is no surprise that Iraq was one of the main reasons, but the United States was also the “nation blamed most often for hurting the world’s environment.” Dislike of the “American way of doing business” had deepened as well. Britain, Germany, and Canada were particularly angry at the intrusion of American ideas and customs into their own culture, despite a “near universal admiration for U.S. technology and a strong appetite for its cultural exports.”
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By way of encouragement to the United States, the survey could offer only that attitudes were “overwhelmingly positive” in Kenya; in Africa in general; and of course in Israel, and that “while opinion of the United States has slipped in Latin America over the past five years, majorities in Mexico, Peru, and even Venezuela still say they have a positive opinion of their large neighbor to the north.”
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