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.4 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.
Chapter 2
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.1 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.”2
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.”3
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.”4 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.5
“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 Un
ion, 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.”6
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.”7
These bleak findings were echoed in a survey of American and European public opinion by the German Marshall Fund, which found that although fewer than a fifth of Europeans approved of President Bush’s policies, nearly half thought the 2008 presidential election would make no difference to their feelings, regardless of who won.8
The Background Noise of British Life
Why do these feelings run so deep in those European countries that are America’s natural allies? Let me start with Britain, because it is the closest European nation to the United States in geography, language, and traditional sympathy. It would be wrong to say that the dominant tone is hostile to America; instead, it is rather a presumption of intimacy, an assumption that anyone knows enough about the United States to offer an expert opinion. But it is startling how often the mixture of affection, admiration, and condescension resolves itself into an expression of overt dislike.
Margaret Drabble, one of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, wrote this in May 2003, two months after the Iraq invasion: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.” She continued, “I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win.”9
So what, you might say. But appealing to such attitudes has become useful political currency. In March 2006, Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London, called Robert Tuttle, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, a “chiseling little crook” for deciding that U.S. embassy staff would not pay the new “congestion charge,” then at £5 a day, for driving into central London. Myself, I think the embassy had a point in arguing that this was a local tax and that —as is the case elsewhere in the world —its diplomats should be exempt, although it presented its case (as too often) astonishingly badly. But the mayor, a maverick with a taste for headlines and more fondness for Venezuela than the United States, judged that the insult would be popular.
Those who object to such attacks, particularly on the political right, often accuse the BBC of systematic bias toward the left, against the United States and against the possibility of success in Iraq. In my experience, the charge is greatly overstated, but in June 2007, a report commissioned by the BBC Board of Governors said that while coverage was generally impartial, the United States was one area in which the broadcaster showed bias. In the report, Justin Webb, one of the BBC’s long-standing reporters in Washington, DC, said that he often had to fight the “casual anti-Americanism” of his colleagues. “In the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about [President] George Bush, although he’s part of the problem. I’m talking about a much wider sense in which we don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts.”10
Leaving aside the debate about the BBC, there is no question that there exists a pronounced vein of anti-American attitudes across both the political left and right. It is noisiest on the left, among those who cut their teeth on the anti-Vietnam and antinuclear demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s, and among those who now see an American hand in the worst effects of globalization. Tony Blair’s wing of the Labour Party, which he had painfully dragged toward the political center, is passionately pro-American as an article of faith, although some of its members have become more subdued, inhibited even, about asserting those shared values, while Gordon Brown’s wing has been noticeably cooler. Anti-American sentiments also have had a long tradition among conservatives, nervous about the erosion of British culture and identity, although they are balanced by the high Tory grandees, former generals and Foreign Office knights of the realm, meeting in the mirrored breakfast rooms of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge to affirm their belief in the transatlantic alliance.
The Attitudes Were There Before Iraq
In London, after the Iraq invasion, a bitter joke among resident Americans was whether to call themselves Canadians to avoid getting into discussions about the war. In a BBC online debate on just that question in April 2006, a Canadian contributor said, “If you suspect your ‘Canadian’ is actually American, ask them to name three provinces (excluding Ontario) or what the capital of Saskatchewan is,” adding, “We don’t like them either, by the way.”11
But Iraq only reactivated attitudes that were there already. On November 2, 2001, in a shocking and much-noticed essay called “The Spirit of Terrorism” in Le Monde, the admired French cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote of his “prodigious jubilation” at the sight of the two planes slamming into the Twin Towers. The superpower had, he said, “through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world,” adding that “we have dreamed of this event, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree.”
Meanwhile, in Britain, the BBC issued a rare public apology for the edition of its Question Time television panel program two days after September 11, 2001, during which members of the audience attacked the United States for bringing the tragedy on itself through its “anti-Arab” policy in the Middle East. According to many reports, Phil Lader, the former U.S. ambassador to the UK who was on the panel and was shouted down by the audience, was close to tears.
These were not isolated incidents. One leading academic analysis noted “an astonishing indifference on display” after 9/11. “From Mexico to Europe to Asia, the search for rationalizations for the attacks set in, mostly led by public intellectuals and sometimes manifested in barely concealed malicious joy,” said academics Michael Werz, transatlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund, and Barbara Fried, a visiting scholar at the University of California, in 2007. “America, the alleged source of violence and all ills, finally had received its comeuppance for its historical role as a global power.”12
Why?
Some of this rising hostility, even before Iraq, can be attributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the world’s sole superpower, the “hyperpower,” in the phrase coined by Hubert Védrine, French foreign minister, in 1999. Tony Blair, in a two-hour interview with The Times in May 2002 which was largely devoted to the transatlantic relationship, said the inspiration for the “anti-American voices” within Europe was “jealousy about America’s position, worry about American culture dominating European culture. Also, partly, America is the world superpower. Anyone who is preeminent always takes a bit of flak.”13 As if to rub home Britain’s dependence on that eminence, the interview had taken place squashed into an eight-seater plane on the way to Madrid, as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s adviser, griped that parliament would not let the prime minister have the equivalent of Air Force One.
The flak which Tony Blair predicted reliably arrived. In Europe, as memory of the Cold War retreated, countries were suddenly able to criticize the United States without depending on
it to defend them from the Soviet Union. European countries also became readier to see American action as high-handed. Unfair as it might seem, in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the United States was accused both of imperialism in leading the military action and of refusing to get enough involved when it declined to put its troops on the ground.
At the same time, the blossoming anti-globalization movement was appropriated by its most energetic campaigners to attack the spread of all things American. The end of the Cold War allowed Europe to explore again its sense that it had very different cultural and intellectual traditions from the New World —that it had, at heart, a very different spirit. Peter Beinart, just before 9/11, put it this way in the New Republic: “During the Cold War, Europe resented America for what it did; today, Europe resents America for what it believes, global warming, missile defense, the death penalty, economic policy —each dispute further illustrated this transatlantic cultural gulf.”14
Peter Schneider, the German writer and academic, was distressed on Americans’ behalf for the sacrifice of soul that had come with their perfection of the body. “One of the great unsolved mysteries of American culture is the devotion Americans have for their teeth. . . . Those with perfect teeth unwittingly suffer a loss. They cannot appreciate the idea that natural diversity or incompleteness is part of a person’s character.”15
Long History of European Anti-Americanism
It is worth saying a word about the deep roots of anti-American feeling across Europe, particularly in France, in arguing why the phenomenon is not about to go away. Britain, France, and Germany were all losers from the “American Century,” as Alexander Stephan, a professor of German at Ohio State University who runs a project studying anti-Americanism around the world, points out.16 They lost empires, territory, and financial power as America rose. But in Britain and Germany, any anti-American feeling was tempered by a strong sense of being closely intertwined with the United States —in Britain’s case, with a common language, whose value in constantly affirming that link is impossible to overstate. The old British left might have agonized over the erosion of British culture through American films and music, and George Orwell may have lamented “half-understood import[s] from America,”17 but in a postwar Britain still dealing with rationed food supplies, America was a land of unattainable plenty.
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