Tucson, Arizona Sunday, 10 March 2002
Time for U.S. to take some humility pills
By Donald Kaul
The votes are in; they've been counted. The results are clear. The world hates us.
Not the whole world, of course. Just Central and South America, most of Europe, virtually all of the Middle East, much of Asia and the parts of Africa that know there is a United States.
OK, maybe "hate" is too strong a word, but "dislike" isn't strong enough.
The world's people find us deeply offensive, like a neighbor who plays his stereo loudly into the middle of the night, every night, then congratulates himself on his generosity for letting the people on the block listen in for free.
You saw evidence of the antipathy we generate at the recently completed Winter Olympic Games.
While it was a terrific Olympics, filled with drama, pathos and showmanship, if the purpose of the Games is to bring nations together, these were a flop.
As a matter of fact, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, our new best friend, called them just that. Not only the Russians, but also the South Koreans (our old best friend) and the French were ticked off at us.
And while the animosity exhibited was keyed to real and imagined injustices suffered by the nations in question (the French, being French, were outraged at being caught cheating), it's clear that we did not have a very deep reservoir of international good will to draw on.
That's not terribly surprising, I suppose. We are the Richest, Most Powerful Country on Earth, and the RMPC is never loved.
People are jealous of its wealth and power, for one thing, and for another, the RMPC tends to be unbearably arrogant and uncaring about the good opinion of others. That's us, down to the ground right now.
George W. Bush talks international cooperation, but when it comes to international agreements - on global warming, law of the sea, the Geneva Convention, the ABM treaty - he adopts a my-way-or-the-highway approach. And Americans like him for it.
Our overbearing ways are compounded by a hypocrisy that is extreme even by the extravagant standards of superpowers.
We act as though we do things only from the highest, most altruistic motives and that we never do anything wrong. When we bomb people, for example, we claim that it is for their own good and are surprised when they are less than grateful.
In short, we confuse being a moralistic nation (which we are) with being a moral one (which we are not).
There are no moral nations; that is, nations that will do the right thing simply because it's right, regardless of self-interest.
Nations are about self-interest. It can be enlightened self-interest - as say, the Marshall Plan was - but self-interest, nevertheless. Morality doesn't much enter into the equation.
Our refusal to acknowledge this common bond that we share with other nations, our smug, holier-than-thou attitude, is what other nations find insufferable about us.
Again Bush is an exemplar of this aspect of the American character. He has a habit of calling people he
doesn't like "evil."
He's done it with "the evil axis" of North Korea, Iran and Iraq, and lately has added Fidel Castro to the list, calling him an "evil tyrant."
That is not only not very useful, it is dangerous because it suggests that it is our mission, as the embodiment of good on the planet, to rid the world of these evil regimes.
That kind of self-righteousness in an RMPC worries foreigners, our friends as well as enemies. It worries me, too.
I think it's best for politicians to leave the consideration of evil to theologians and concentrate on doing what they're paid to do - avoiding war, fighting disease, feeding the multitudes, educating children.
And we might, in the meantime, show a little humility. We're not as smart as we think we are, and, while we're on a good run right now, it won't last forever. It never has.
* Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for The Des Moines Register. He is a columnist with Minuteman Media. |
