By Julia E. Sweig
JULIA E. SWEIG is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is "Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century."
AMERICA'S MORAL standing in the world has precipitously declined since 2001. For starters, blame the Bush administration's go-it-alone tough talk after 9/11, contempt for the Kyoto accord, war and then chaos in Iraq, secret prisons in Europe and alleged use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Democrats would have you believe that a new team — theirs — in Washington would change all this. Not so fast.
| I'm not in the least concerned with our "moral standing," at least as perceived by the International Community™. As far as I can tell, Kofi Annan and the UN have lotsa "moral standing" in their eyes, even while being blatantly corrupt, inefficient, and a detriment to actual peace. The UN's corpse count over the years dwarfs anything the U.S. has done since 9-11 — just Rwanda drawfs it. Our go-it-alone tough talk was in response to a Pearl Harbor class attack on our nation, not some passing fit of pique, some girlish snit, and we face an enemy that matches Imperial Japan for fanaticism and brutality. Most of our citizens have a healthy contempt for the Kyoto Accord, and it's losing ground among those nations that previously bought into it. War and chaos in Iraq comes from fighting against a tenacious and vicious enemy, the joining of Baathism — literally a form of fascism — and al-Qaeda. The enemy's strategy is that if they can't rule the country with an iron fist they'll make it unlivable. The secret prisons hold secret prisoners, the heads of al-Qaeda, the masterminds, the people who blow up large numbers of innocents. I'm less concerned about their rights than I am about the safety of the the unoffending going about their lawful business. If you've got a real interest in torture, take a close look at the tactics of the enemy and contrast them with a few fake menses at Guantanamo. I think even the most hardened Islamist would rather have real blooch dribbled on him than have his head and/or genitalia cut off. |
Around the world, anti-Americanism is not simply the result of anger about President Bush's foreign policies. Rather, it is deeply entrenched antipathy accumulated over decades. It may take generations to undo.
Consider the causes:• Cold War legacy: U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and covert attempts to overthrow governments in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba, among others, created profound distrust of U.S. motives throughout the developing world. Europeans also disdain these policies and bemoan the cultural coarseness of Americanization sweeping their continent.
| Anti-Americanism was something that was fostered as state policy by the Soviet Union over many years. The Soviets are comfortably ensconced in the trash heap of history, despite all attempts to revive them, but that particular legacy lives on. While we were running our side of the Cold War, they were running theirs, and I fear they ran their propaganda machine better than we ran ours. Their educational system wasn't available to us to subvert, even if we could have brought ourselves to do it, which we probably couldn't. And that "cultural coarseness" that Julia's talking about is called "vitality." When Europeans come up with something vital it sweeps this country. That's how we ended up with Abba. Turtlenecks and Gauloises don't cut it when it comes to vitality, though I'm not quite sure why the Chicken Dance never caught on here. |
Americans, by contrast, tend to dismiss this side of the Cold War. Gore Vidal famously referred to this country as the United States of Amnesia. We're all about moving forward, getting over it, a nation of immigrants for whom leaving the past behind was a geographic, psychological and often political act. As the last guy standing when the Cold War ended, in 1989, we expected the world to embrace free markets and liberal democracy.
| That would have been a rational move on the part of the rest of the world. We don't live in a rational world, though. We live in a world where people, even in this country, want a Fearless Leader™ with all the answers laid out. |
• Power and powerlessness: Power generates resentment. But the United States has lost the ability to see its power from the perspective of those with less of it. In Latin America, for example, U.S. policies — whether on trade, aid, democracy, drugs or immigration — presumed that Latin Americans would automatically see U.S. interests as their own. And when denied deference, we sometimes lash out, as did Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when he lumped Germany, a close U.S. ally, with Cuba and Libya because Berlin opposed the Iraq war.
| Not precisely. Our bitch wasn't so much the opposition to the war, but the anti-American cheapshots Schroeder's administration took. We weren't happy with Cretien's Canada, either. And we lumped Germany with France, not with Cuba and Libya. |
• Globalization: In the 1990s, our government, private sector and opinion makers sold globalization as virtually synonymous with Americanization. President Clinton promised that open markets, open societies and smaller government would be the bridge to the 21st century. So where globalization hasn't delivered, the U.S. is blamed.
| I'm not too sure where globalization hasn't delivered. The people most opposed to globalization are those who run regimes where globalization is implemented haltingly, if at all. The countries that are prospering are precisely the ones who have. Pre-globalization India was the place we used to send food for the Starving Chldren™. Now they're sending groceries to the Starvin Children™ in Somalia or someplace. |
• What we stand for: Bush is wrong to say that foreigners hate us because of our values and freedoms.
| That they hate us for our freedoms is a demonstrably true statement when discussing the shariah and scimitar set. It's demonstrably true when discussing backwaters like Cuba and Sudan and Syria, where iron-fisted dictatorship is the ideal. What're we discussing, Julia? Brazil? Bolivia? Kabila's Congo? |
Quite the contrary. U.S. credibility abroad used to be reinforced by the perception that our laws and government programs gave most Americans a fair chance to participate in a middle-class meritocracy. But the appeal of the U.S. model overseas is eroding as the gap between rich and poor widens, public education deteriorates, healthcare costs soar and pensions disappear.
| Are you tracing out why? Some things are bad ideas, but once implemented you can't undo them. Health insurance falls into that category. It wasn't until HMOs were introduced, partially in response to increased tort lawyering, that the price of a visit to the doctor started going up each and every year. Public education began deteriorating about the time we established a Department of Education. Pension benefits began disappearing when they became too generous for companies to maintain, especially while unions were dipping into them. But our laws and government programs do give Americans a fair chance to participate in a middle-class meritocracy. The country's not run by old money. The economy's powered more by first and second generation Americans. |
Most recently, the U.S. government's seeming indifference to its most vulnerable citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina further undercut belief in the American social contract. The immigration debates also have fostered the perception that the U.S. is vulnerable, hostile and fearful.
| Katrina was a unique meeting of an historic storm with a federal government that was prepared for a storm of less than hisotric dimension, a state government that was marked by ineptitude and indecisiveness, and a city government that gave rise to the phrase Stuck on Stupid. Add in hysterical reporting by a hostile press and a natural disaster that was dwarfed by Indonesia's tsunami and Pakistan's earthquake becomes an iconic event. Perception is everything, apparently. We don't seem to spend a lot of time dwelling on the devastation wrought by the same storm on Mississippi and Alabama, do we? |
Nevertheless, the ideal of the United States as a beacon of justice, democracy, freedom and human rights still garners grudging respect abroad. Despite the perverse appeal of anti-Americanism, its proliferation hurts not only the U.S. but global security. For all the resentments that U.S. leadership generates, in the absence of an appealing alternative, it remains a much-desired resource. That's why the U.S. could still get its global groove back.
| If we spent less time worrying about our "global groove" and more time about doing what's right we'd be a lot better off. But I suppose we're still stuck on perception, rather than reality. |
But there is no quick fix. Liberals tempted to out-Bush Bush in the battle against terrorism risk sowing the seeds of a future backlash in the developing world. The U.S. will be no less powerful in the eyes of powerless nations if Democrats win control of Congress in November. Harsh global competition isn't going away either. As a result, the wellsprings of anti-Americanism will not dry up anytime soon.
| Oh. We're not supposed to compete globally at all? That makes sense. Not a lot of sense, but sense. |
But anti-Americanism will begin to ebb if the new watchwords of U.S. policy and conduct are pragmatism, generosity, modesty, discretion, cooperation, empathy, fairness, manners and lawfulness.
| Oh, I see. We should become more like the Euros. Lemme see, here. How to be pragmatic? Well, we could increase our support for Pakistan, despite its obvious failings and its role as a hub of terrorism. And we could not invade Arabia, since that's where the money for terrorism is coming from. Instead we could work behind the scenes, occasionally reading them the riot act in private, while in public rubbing their shoulders and jollificating with them. And generosity? We could dump a few billion into Africa to help them try and control their AIDS problem. And for the rest of it, we could profess — modestly and discretely, of course — how very cooperative we are, we could empathize with the ratholes of the world, feeling their pain with exquisite good manners while adhering to the letter of the law, the while making deals in private and extending our commericial interests at the expense of the local populace, kind of like La Belle France does. I guess that's not a bad idea, though I'd have to bathe a little more often than I do. |
This softer lexicon should not be construed as a refutation of the use of force against hostile states or terrorist groups.
| No, no! Certainly not! But we'd have to do it with modesty, discretion, cooperation, empathy, fairness, manners and lawfulness. Gotcha. |
Rather, a foreign policy that deploys U.S. power with some consideration for how the U.S. is perceived will gradually make legitimate U.S. military action more acceptable abroad.
| Actually, I'd rather deploy U.S. power and have it perceived as an invicible machine of destruction that will pull the house down around the ears of the world's most repressive regimes. Howzat sound? |
Personalities do matter. And not just the president's. The global initiatives of private American citizens — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Gordon Moore, Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg — carry the kind of message that government-sponsored public diplomacy can't match.
| Angelina Jolie? Oprah? How about thousands of men and women who are actually turning the wheels of commerce, keeping this country and hundreds of associated enterprises worldwide in business, making money and jobs? How about a policy that cultivates Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and Thailand, rather than rushing to try and make friends with dictatorships and kleptocracies? Do we really care in the least what Zim-bob-we thinks about us? |
And symbols matter too. We should close Guantanamo.
| Bush said he's going to do that. I think it's the wrong move. Reality matters more than symbolism. And the rest of the world isn't going to say "Aren't the Americans nice, now that they've close Guantanamo!" They'll merely move on to the next bitch. |
Recovering our global standing will come not only from how we fight or prevent the next war, or manage an increasingly chaotic world. Domestic policy must change as well. Steering the body politic out of its insular mood, reducing social and economic inequalities, and decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels will help improve our moral standing and our security.
| They pay people to be this dopy at the Council on Foreign Relations? |
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