Posted on 01/10/2008 4:36:05 PM PST by americanophile
How can America improve its image abroad? Answers to this question are being bandied by all of the presidential hopefuls. Hillary Clinton says she would “send a message heard across the world: The era of cowboy diplomacy is over.” John McCain promises to “immediately close Guantanamo Bay.” Ron Paul and Barack Obama both say they would withdraw American troops from Iraq.
Implicit is the notion that George W Bush has tarnished America’s reputation in the world, and that reversing some of his more contentious policies will make the United States popular again. If only it were that simple.
Although polls do indeed show that President Bush has brought anti-Americanism to the surface in many parts of the world, the roots of enmity toward America reach far deeper than one man and his policies. The problem of anti-Americanism will not go away just because Americans elect a new president.
Contrary to much of today’s conventional wisdom, anti-Americanism is not a recent phenomenon. In Europe, for example, anti-Americanism is as old as the United States itself. In fact, anti-Americanism is so established on the Old Continent that there are now as many different brands of anti-Americanism as there are European countries.
Take Spain, for example, where anti-Americanism goes back to the Spanish-American War, which in 1898 drove the final nail into the coffin of the Spanish empire and ended its colonial exploitation of Cuba. Many Spaniards also resent America’s support for General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), who in his day was popular with the Americans because of his strong anti-Communist credentials.
In Germany, anti-Americanism is an exercise in moral relativism. Germans desperately want their country to be perceived as a “normal” country, and its elites are using anti-Americanism as a political tool to absolve themselves and their parents of the crimes of World War II. They routinely equate the US invasion of Iraq with the Holocaust, for example, as a psychological ruse to make themselves feel better about their sordid past.
In France, anti-Americanism is an inferiority complex masquerading as a superiority complex. France is the birthplace of anti-Americanism (the first act of which has been traced to a French lawyer in the late 1700s), and bashing the United States is an inexpensive way to indulge France’s fantasies of past greatness and splendor.
As political realists like Thucydides (c 460-395 BC) might have predicted, anti-Americanism is also a visceral reaction against the current distribution of global power. America commands a level of economic, military and cultural influence that leaves many around the world envious, resentful and even angry and afraid. Indeed, most purveyors of anti-Americanism will continue to bash America until the United States is balanced or replaced (by those same anti-Americans, of course) as the dominant actor on the global stage.
In Europe, for example, where self-referential elites are pathologically obsessed with their perceived need to “counter-balance” the United States, anti-Americanism is now the dominant ideology of public life. In fact, it is no coincidence that the spectacular rise in anti-Americanism in Europe has come at precisely the same time that the European Union, which often struggles to speak with one voice, has been trying to make its political weight felt both at home and abroad.
In their quest to transform Europe into a superpower capable of challenging the United States, European elites are using anti-Americanism to forge a new pan-European identity. This artificial post-modern European “citizenship”, which demands allegiance to a faceless bureaucratic superstate based in Brussels instead of to the traditional nation-state, is being set up in opposition to the United States. To be “European” means (nothing more and nothing less than) to not be an American.
Because European anti-Americanism has much more to do with European identity politics than with genuine opposition to American foreign policy, European elites do not really want the United States to change. Without the intellectual crutch of anti-Americanism, the new “Europe” would lose its raison d'être.
Anti-Americanism also drives Europe’s fixation with its diplomatic and economic “soft power” alternative as the elixir for the world’s problems. Europeans despise America’s military “hard power” because it magnifies the preponderance of US power and influence on the world stage, thereby exposing the fiction behind Europe’s superpower pretensions.
Europeans know they will never achieve hard power parity with America, so they want to change the rules of the international game to make soft power the only acceptable superpower standard. Toward this end, European elites seek to de-legitimize one of the main pillars of American influence by making it prohibitively costly in the realm of international public opinion for the United States to use its military power in the future. By ensconcing a system of international law based around the United Nations, they hope to constrain American exercise of power. For Europeans, multilateralism is about neutering American hard power, not about solving international problems. It is, as the cliché goes, about Lilliputians tying down Gulliver.
Many American foreign policy mavens refuse to recognize this. In fact, they often over-idolize European soft power, largely because they share the European belief that a multilateral world order is the proper antidote to global anti-Americanism.
Case in point is a new report on “smart power” recently released by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The document proffers policy advice based on the fiction that the blame for anti-Americanism lies entirely with the United States. It calls on the next president to fix the problem of anti-Americanism by pursuing a neo-liberal norm-based internationalist foreign policy; it argues, predictably, that America can restore its standing in the world by working through the United Nations and by signing the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court.
But the report says not a word about the gratuitous anti-American bigotry of Europe’s “sophisticated” elites. Nor does it acknowledge that most European purveyors of anti-Americanism are far more opposed to what America is than to what America does. It is not primarily US foreign policy they seek to change: What Europeans (and many of their American converts) want is a wholesale re-creation of America in the post-modern European pacifist image.
To earn the approbation of Europe’s sanctimonious elites, the next American president would (for starters) have to relinquish all use of military force, surrender US sovereignty to the United Nations, adopt a socialist economic model, abolish the death penalty, accept an Iranian nuclear bomb, abandon US support for Israel, appease the Islamic world in a high-minded “Alliance of Civilizations”… and so on.
Anti-Americanism is (at least for the foreseeable future) a zero-sum game because the main purveyors of anti-Americanism are in denial about the dangers facing the world today. They believe the United States is the problem and that their vision for a post-modern socialist multicultural utopia is the solution. Never mind that most Europeans do not have enough faith in their own model to want to pass it on to the next generation.
This is the dilemma America faces: If it wants to be popular abroad, it will have to pay in terms of reduced security. And if it determines to protect the American way of life from global threats, then it will have to pay in terms of reduced popularity abroad.
But if America loses out against the existential threats posed by global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam, then the issue of America’s international image will be mute.
Better, therefore, if the next president focuses on keeping America strong and secure, rather than on pleasing those who will never like the United States, even if its foreign policy is more benign.
Better, also, for the next president to focus on wielding American power wisely, because doing so will earn the United States (grudging) respect, which in the game of unstable relationships that characterizes modern statecraft, is far more important than love.
Very interesting.
I am not an expert on this. However, I believe, in the case of Sarkozy, he did by not allowing his candidacy become a "referendum on the U.S." He shaped the debate, and won on a combination of issues as well as his vision and style. This is what a successful politician must do.
“How can USA improve its image abroad?”
This kind of article is biased since it begins by this question.
US don’t have to improve its image abroad because that’s only rabid muzzy crowds or lib-leftist west-european crowds who shout and make noise...
USA should stay quiet and accept to be attacked everywhere and deny its values to please all those misled crowds.
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.
This is just a lib fairy song:”everyone will love us if you smile!What did Bill with OUSSAMA BLADEN BTW ?
Eastern Europe is very different from western Europe
Ive said this before anyways: the role of the UN is to stifle our interests, and that was the same reason why the EU was formed.
We shouldnt even be shouldering $$$ for the majority of NATO operations and let the Euroweenies defend themselves. It’s best to sacrifice them to the Islamists while we re-load stateside.
You are never going to please every country.
You should stand for what you stand for, do what you can to back up those countries who agree with you, and those people within the various countries who agree with you.
Be loyal to your friends within reason, don’t be too quick to sell them out in exchange for a bump in the polls. When you do all that you should do, and public opinion turns against you, just remember that history is the long haul, and sometimes you may have to fight, and persuade, and sometimes history will have to vindicate you because the press and your political enemies sure aren’t going to.
The last thing you ever want to do is let the press and their pollsters tell you what your policies must be, and who your friends are.
I can’t speak on France... but have some first hand knowledge on Germany. Anti-Americanism IS the driving ideology in most peoples foreing policy thinking. From left to right, with few exceptions. The Anti-American (anti-US conservative) image gets hammered into their heads daily by most of their media. It’s worse than the US MSM. Now as you know all politics are local. The Merkel win has few to do with Schroeder’s US relations. It’s domestic policy and European policy they care about. Every survey and the current Parliamentary politics show an unwillingness to fight in the WoT. They talk about their quasi-nonexistant Afghanistan engagement as if it compares to the US mission in Iraq. You know the talking points:”quagmire” etc.
There is no denying that, Europeans (West Europeans that is... not Poland, Czechs or Denmark etc.) have strong elitist, anti-american attitudes.
No hillary, your message and that of all of the dems is "Better to live on our knees as slaves than fight on our feet as free men."
I give a rat's a$$ what the world thinks of us as long as they fear us and still have to come humbly with downcast eyes to ask for $20 and the car keys.
Sarkozy was well known to be pro-American, he was criticized for it in his election campaign.
Bush’s main enemies in the West are gone; Schroeder in Germany, Chirac in France, Chretien in Canada, all of them replaced by conservatives.
Don’t let your enemies define you, and don’t ever let the press define you.
Very good read, though nothing that the average Freeper doesn’t already know forwards and backwards.
Not exactly diplomatic...but damn refreshing! :)
So basically it’s what we’ve always known—IOW, they’re just jealous (of our superpower status). Some of those people are so eaten up with blind jealousy that they’d cut their own noses off to spite their faces-I’ve seen more and more on certain message boards, the sentiment expressed that they’ll be glad when China overtakes us, and words to that effect. How stupid can they be? Like China is going to even pretend to pacify their little inferiority complexes. China, if ever entrenched, won’t give a rat’s azz about their widdle feelings, and coddle them like the US does, to be “diplomatic”.
Thanks.
My daughter just did that. Of course I asked if $20 would be enough.
He makes a good point, that Europeans over-idealize "soft power" because they have chosen not to develop any "hard power" of their own, their self-image depends on making a virtue of their weakness. This is not to disparage those countries who have deployed what "hard power" they have into the fight at hand. We appreciate it and we appreciate them.
He makes another good point, which is that most Euro governments are socialist, and again making a virtue out of their weakness they will not rest until we have adopted their model, until we have allowed the liliputians to strap us down.
But if America loses out against the existential threats posed by global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam, then the issue of America’s international image will be mute.
"mute" should read "moot"...
Otherwise, well written and good analysis.
We are the only power capable of being the adult in this world.
Kern hits the nail on the head with his observation about how European elitists want to change America into a European vassal. Of course Democrats are more than willing to go along with this. The result would be a world with it’s throat bared to radical Islam and other evildoers. Who are ever in waiting for their chance.
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