Andrew Sullivan:
Britain's New Clout
The Fruits of Anti-Anti-Americanism
I can remember the last time I was an anti-American. It was eighteen years ago, wincing at the vulgarity of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. I threw in the towel when Lionel Ritchie was a key feature of the opening ceremonies. Or was it the choreographed Elvis impersonators? I can't remember now. The sheer crassness, commercialism, and unabashed American nationalism turned this young Brit off. It was a combination of exuberance and sheer power - certainly enough for a young European to affect elevated disdain.
But disdain for what? America? The very idea, I came to realize, is preposterous. America is many things - now, perhaps, more than ever. It is rural Alabama and urban San Francisco. It is Michael Moore and Jerry Falwell. It's Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld. It's MTV and the right to bear arms. It's a country that still won't accept a one-dollar coin but embraced the Internet with the enthusiasm of a teenage crush. It's cowboy country in Wyoming and Little Havana in Miami. It's Rambo and the "Sopranos." It's Little Vietnam in the exurbs of Virginia and mega-churches in suburban Houston. Anyone who despises all this despises not America but humanity. And humanity in one of the most daring multicultural, multiracial experiments in human history.
Of course, most anti-Americanism today doesn't deal with this complex reality. It deals with the fact of American hyper-power, and its impact on the broader world. In this sense, it's a new form of anti-Americanism. It's anti-Americanism without the counter-balance of fearing the Soviet Union. And it's anti-Americanism without the positive element of twentieth-century faith in socialism or Marxism. This makes it in some ways a purer anti-Americanism, one that simply hates American power, rather than one that posits any credible alternative. And it's made far worse by the relative growth of exactly that power. The post-Cold War 1990s, after all, saw economic stagnation and rapid disarmament in much of Europe, combined with a massive boom and military investment in the U.S. What was once dominance has become de facto hegemony. So anti-Americanism now looms in the world's psyche without any of its erstwhile anchors. It isn't tempered by fear of a rival super-power; it isn't fortified by a vital economic or political alternative. And when American power is actually deployed, this free-floating animosity mutates into a kind of hatred.
Do I exaggerate? Just take a look at some of the "anti-war" demonstrations in the U.S. and Europe. "Bomb Texas. I Like Iraq," was a recent slogan. "Bush is the Real Terrorist" announces another. The imputation of evil motives to this White House among otherwise intelligent people is now simply routine. It is a given that the United States could not be sincere in its attempt to rid the world of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It has to be a cloak for an oil-grab; or a Zionist conspiracy; or a corporate coup. Bush's cabinet, according to John Le Carre, is a "junta," - no different in legitimacy than the junta raping Burma or or the military dictator in Pyongyang.
This is not to say that there are no good reasons to criticize American foreign policy. Abandoning Kyoto was forgivable, given what the treaty would have done to the U.S. economy. But proposing no credible alternative wasn't. Ditto the Bush administration's now collapsed policy toward North Korea - an incoherent mix of bluster and now appeasement. And its occasional clumsiness in trans-Atlantic diplomacy could also be improved.
But the anti-Americanism I'm speaking of is not of this kind. It's not designed to persuade the United States to alter its policies in one arena or another. It's designed to demonize the United States as a whole, to portray it as almost morally equivalent to the Islamist terrorism it is trying to hold back. In fact, this anti-Americanism - which embraces the far left and elements of the far-right as well - rarely proposes anything positive. And as it recites its mantras of anti-American contempt, and summons every American failing of the past fifty years without ever crediting America's successes, it marinates in its own resentment. It teeters on the edge of anti-Semitism and occasionally embraces it. In its hatred of the United States, it even finds itself close to finding excuses for the barbarity of Saddam Hussein, the cruelty of the Taliban or the malevolence of al Qaeda. There is something truly sickening in the sight of people who call themselves liberals finding more fault in America than in the brutal, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic dictatorships who are now pitted against the West.
The facts don't seem to matter. America is portrayed as an imperial force dedicated to what a Harvard professor recently described as "the crushing and total humiliation of the Palestinians." Yet it was an American president, Bill Clinton, who only two years ago brokered a deal that offered the Palestinians sovereignty over 98 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. (Arafat said no and his people are still living with the consequences.) America is described as waging a war against Muslims. Yet in almost every recent American intervention - in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan - it was for the sake of the security of Muslims that American soldiers risked their lives. America is described as relentlessly pro-Israel. But America gives almost as much foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan. America is described as imperialist. But in Afghanistan, recently liberated by the U.S., the Americans have done all they can to set up an indigenous government, capable of self-rule, and are pouring millions of dollars into reconstruction. America is described as unilateralist. Yet, after the worst terrorist attack in modern history, the U.S. patiently assembled a coalition to rid the world of al Qaeda's Afghan bases, and has waited eleven years while Saddam has violated almost every term of the 1991 truce. Even now, the U.S. has gone painstakingly through a U.N. route to achieve its goals. These are simply the facts. But in the new cult of anti-Americanism, facts don't seem to matter.
I'm happy to wager that history will find Tony Blair's resistance to this kind of cant as one of his signal achievements as prime minister. Blair is a liberal realist. He knows America isn't perfect; but that its power is essentially a positive force in the world. Without America, after all, Europe would still be under the shadow of an al Qaeda still lurking undeterred in its Afghan lair. Without America, Saddam might be sitting pretty in Saudi Arabia today with an arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Without America, there would be no united Europe, and there would be no new democracies in Eastern Europe ready to join. If that's the consequence of an American empire, then Europe is its chief beneficiary.
And Blair gets something else too. It is simply not in Britain's interest to give into the crass delusions of anti-Americanism. The notion that Blair is somehow George Bush's "poodle" is ludicrous, and certainly seen as such in Washington. By his emotional and instinctive support for the U.S. in the wake of September 11, by his steadfast support during the Afghan war and in the Iraq crisis, Blair has wielded more influence in Washington than any other world leader. Because of this, he now has more leverage over American power than any British prime minister in recent times, eclipsing even Thatcher's sway over Reagan. And that means an enormous increase in Britain's relative global power - now and for the future. If you don't believe this, contrast the results of Blair's diplomacy with Gerhard Schroder's. It's the difference between being at the center of world governance and utterly marginalized. In fact, Blair has managed to vault Britain back to the status of a genuine world power. When he huddles with George Bush at Camp David at the end of this month, he will be the most powerful British prime minister since Churchill at Yalta.
This wasn't the reason for Blair's pro-American foreign policy. Blair clearly backs the U.S. on al Qaeda and Iraq because he sees the grave danger to Britain that only America, with Britain's help, can prevent. But unprecedented British leverage is a side-product. The man who came to power promising to make Britain a central power-broker in Europe has, by chance or design, done something rather different. By resisting the empty rhetoric of the hate-America left, Blair has made Britain a power-broker on a far grander level. We have the beginnings of an Anglo-American entente - what some in Washington are calling an "Anglosphere" - that could wield enormous influence for the good in the years and decades to come. Blair's ability to see through the rhetoric and flim-flam to the real America, and to see Britain's opportunity therein, has the makings of a historic diplomatic achievement. If only his party and country could see that. Perhaps, given time, they will.
andrewsullivan.com |
