What Happened to the Americans?
Imperialists, Pax-Americanists or misunderstood liberators? Being an American abroad has never been tougher and however you slice it, what Uncle Sam is selling the world isn’t buying. Will that change with a liberated Iraq?
By Sam Coleman
It was ironic that I was in Foam Gallery giving an interview to Noord Holland TV about the rise of anti-Americanism and of course, the war. I suggested the gallery because they have an excellent exhibit showing called All American; a series of very typical portraits and scenes that combat—however slightly—the view of the US as a land of war-mongering George Bushes. It was against this backdrop that I answered all the Usual Questions from how does it feel to be vilified (“Seeing ‘Yankee Go Home’ draped over two windows near Leidseplein is something I’d never seen. Sad, that’s the emotion I’d describe it as.”) to if Americans feel less safe in Holland (“No. Holland is a safe place.”) It went on, it’s become somewhat of a professional script that I imagine many US citizens are reciting. Some apologetically, some patriotically, some defensively. No American that I know of doesn’t feel the suspicion of history gone sour upon them.
In Foam Gallery, just a week before, I had heard a telling statement that sets the title for this essay. Two women, peering intently at a portrait, stopped, looked at each other in unison. I can still see the skewed expression on the one woman’s face as the beauty of the picture clashed with her recent resentment at the American government’s policies. “What,” she began with great exasperation, “happened to the Americans?” They shook their heads, wan and grave, a sad query that neither had an adequate answer to. They were disappointed and that disbelief extends to a vast majority of the world. America, beacon of freedom, seems to have folded inwardly, even as its military extends outwardly. What happened?
Well, obviously, 9/11. That feeling of intense vulnerability has shaped most of the psychological response, no doubt about it. At the time of this writing the war has begun, maybe it’s over, maybe we’re dealing with a chemical attack on the battlefield, on a western population center. Everyone is convinced, this conflict won’t erase that insecurity. In fact it may be increased. Assigning all of this to 9/11 is a simple, given answer and for many, account for the dramatic shift in America. For me there are two other, far more compelling elements at work. One is called the post-Vietnam Doctrine and the other a new found liberation complex. Taken together, they form a bedrock of public opinion and justification for a new kind of nationalism that’s risen in the US. First the post-Vietnam Doctrine.
America is by nature fairly isolationist. It really doesn’t like extending itself into conflicts that it sees no strategic reason for engaging in. It would rather take care of business at home than pursue some far-flung escapade, given the choice. That tendency was powerfully instilled as LBJ and Nixon became mired in Vietnam, an adventure that marked the American psyche deeply. Troops dying for dubious, foreign reasons was not what American values were all about. For the next twenty years we’d spend our time fighting the Russian Bear in cold, rather than hot, conflict. Then came the CNN effect which dictated that even one American casualty was too many. US military intervention was extremely limited, assigned to little more than aerial bombing.
Starting with Reagan though and no means excluding Clinton, Americans began weaning themselves off their reluctance to use force and in the logic of the times we live in, pre-emptive force is justified and loss of life—on both sides—considered acceptable. The war in Iraq is the first battle of the Bush Doctrine, a paradigm so well elucidated by Robert Kagan in Paradise and Power. The trepidation of Vietnam is over.
The second principle, The Liberation Complex, is also a feature that has been conjured up through this process. That psychology cannot be underrated, even though it is fairly unfathomable to anybody but Americans (WWI, WWII, The Cold War, Bosnia/Kosovo/Serbia and now Afghanistan) Nigerians (Liberia) and Vietnamese (Cambodia) who see themselves as people who were willing to intervene with the lives of their own to liberate another, repressed population. It’s the height of bad global manners to say such a thing, tantamount to bragging. Yet indeed, the Americans—either by dint of fact or practiced delusion—do see themselves as a force that frees people from tyranny, a superpower whose military must be used for such endeavors. Freed from the Vietnam Complex, armed with this new willingness, American opinion is surprisingly behind the Bush Doctrine. For now at least.
Make no mistake about it though: on a very individual level, in every crease and weave of America there is sadness, there is a Hamlet like state of melancholy that shadows any of the gingoism the world witnesses. America will never be a Roman Empire, gleeful at its ability to inflict cruel depravations on anybody it chooses. It cannot accept being called a bully. In a weird way it will always regard itself as a young, brash nation—the underdog who fought for its sovereignty and in turn looks at any who suffer under that face as brethren, people who desire constitutional democracy.
That was a simpler world, a time of naïve belief that everyone knew the US was a friend of the weak. Now—whether they want to or not, whether the promises remain empty or fulfilled—they’ll need to prove themselves to a suspicious world. And that road, as we all see, is a lonely road for Uncle Sam to walk.
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