Uncle Scam

The jam America finds itself in is that it's the first empire that wants to be popular, wants to be liked. That's a very American quality: "Please like us!!!"

NYT
May 14, 2006
Books on Anti-Americanism
They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us
Review by ROBERT WRIGHT

You wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Andrew Kohut, a pollster and commentator who seems to divide his time between quantifying America's Bush-era plunge in the world's esteem and quantifying Bush's plunge in America's esteem. Then again, you also wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Julia E. Sweig, a liberal senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But Sweig's "Friendly Fire" joins Kohut's "America Against the World" (written with the columnist Bruce Stokes) in showing that Bush isn't the only one to blame for the world's dim view of the United States. And these days that counts as good news for Bush.

Whether it's good news for the United States is another question. Once you see the deep and diffuse roots of current anti-Americanism, you realize there won't be an easy fix. Still, these two books — especially "Friendly Fire," the more prescriptive of the two — offer insight into how we might avoid what Sweig calls "the Anti-American Century."

The strain of "American exceptionalism" that President Bush has made internationally infamous is hardly new, Sweig notes. A Latin America specialist, she can list a century's worth of examples of the dubious idea that "America could throw its weight around — willy-nilly of international law or the sovereignty of other states — because its goals were noble, its values universal in their appeal."

And she doesn't stop with Latin America. More obviously germane to current headlines than the 1954 coup America sponsored in Guatemala is the one it sponsored in Iran in 1953, ushering in the secular authoritarianism that would in turn usher in the fundamentalist revolution of 1979. This, like so much American support for oppression during the cold war, made less of an impact on Americans than on the oppressed. "The dramas that contained the seeds of today's rebellion played out in obscurity, as yet imperceptible to the naked American eye," Sweig writes in the course of her sweeping and pungent review of abrasive American foreign policies.

Anti-Americanism emanating from globalization also long predates the Bush presidency. As Kohut and Stokes point out in their data-rich book, international resentment of American culture (movies, McDonald's) and business practices (long work hours) was appearing in Gallup polls by the early 1980's.

If America has been alienating people for decades, why has anti-Americanism so rarely gotten the attention it's getting now? For one thing, several forces have converged to create a new truth: national security depends crucially on foreign feelings toward America.

Of course, it was always important that some people — notably political leaders in nations deemed allies — like us. (Alienating freshly installed dictators has long been considered poor strategy.) But popular sentiment mattered less in the years before democratization made leaders beholden to the masses in so many countries, and before microelectronic information technology made the masses in even authoritarian nations more unruly.

And, of course, terrorism wasn't the threat it is now. The Venezuelans who stoned Vice President Richard Nixon's car in 1958 might have made their grievances felt more powerfully and farther to the north if they'd had modern munitions, transportation and information technology. Neither book much emphasizes this peril of anti-Americanism — the growing lethality of grass-roots hatred. But the war on terror is the backdrop for their illumination of how anti-Americanism impedes effective alliances.

America's post-cold-war pre-eminence — and the sudden visibility of that pre-eminence — complicates our attempts to win friends. People already ambivalent about encroaching American culture and commerce can increasingly see affluent America itself via video. Masses that have long felt bitterly toward the rich in their own nations can transfer some antipathy to their new next-door neighbors, us: the globalization of resentment.

In sum, by the late 90's America was becoming a more natural target for ill will, even as its national security rested increasingly on good will. More than ever, we needed a leader of diplomatic sensibility, keenly attuned to the hopes and fears of diverse peoples, willing to help other nations address their priorities.

And in walked . . . George W. Bush. His alleged failures in this regard have been so thoroughly discussed that we can save time by evoking them with keywords: "crusade," "evil," Kyoto, Iraq, Bolton, Geneva Convention and so on. There's no proving Sweig's contention that Bush's "policies and nonpolicies . . . stripped bare the latent structural anti-American animus that had accumulated over time," but Kohut's Pew Research Center polls show that global opinion of the United States has plummeted under Bush — not just since its unnatural post-9/11 high, but since he took office.

And this time it's personal. Only a few years ago, anti-Americanism focused on government policies; the world "held Americans in higher esteem than America," Kohut and Stokes note. But foreigners are "increasingly equating the U.S. people with the U.S. government."

Kohut and Stokes argue, in effect, that these foreigners are confused, that Americans aren't in the grips of the offensive exceptionalism lately exhibited by their government. According to the polls, "the American people, as opposed to some of their leaders, seek no converts to their ideology." And they are not "cultural imperialists." Maybe not. But this reserve seems grounded less in humility (60 percent of Americans consider their culture "superior to others") than in apathy. Americans, Kohut and Stokes write, tend "to downplay the importance of America's relationship to other nations . . . to be indifferent to global issues . . . to lack enthusiasm for multinational efforts and institutions" and in general to have "an inattentive self-centeredness unmindful of their country's deepening linkages with other countries."

In other words: We're not obnoxiously evangelistic, just obnoxiously self-involved. So even if Bush doesn't reflect the real America, and is replaced by someone who does, we'll still be in trouble. At least, we'll be in trouble if much of the problem is indeed, as Sweig argues, the longstanding "near inability of the United States to see its power from the perspective of the powerless." Changing that will require not a leader worthy of the people, but a leader willing to lead the people.

Sweig complains that "Americans think of themselves as kings and queens of the world's prom." But, actually, we can't escape that role, at least for now. In wealth and power we are No. 1. The question is whether we'll be the typical prom king or queen — resented by most at the bottom of the social hierarchy and many in the middle — or instead the rare prom king or queen who manages to be really, truly, you know, popular.

Americans may be bad at doing what Sweig recommends — "seeing ourselves as others see us" — but we're not alone in this. People in general have trouble putting themselves in the shoes of people whose circumstances differ from theirs. That's why the world is such a mess — and why succeeding at this task would qualify as real moral progress.

So history has put America in a position where its national security depends on its further moral growth. This is scary but also kind of inspiring. Maybe the term "American greatness" needn't have the militaristic connotations lately attached to it. Here, perhaps, is an exceptionalism worth aspiring to. But if we succeed, let's try not to brag about it.