THE INTERCHANGEABLE NITWITS:

The indispensable nation: From Prague to Pretoria, the United States is not popular. : a review of The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World by Mark Hertsgaard (Andy Beckett, September 21, 2002, The Guardian)

[A] third of the way through the book Hertsgaard's focus turns inwards, to the United States' actual deeds and psyche. The America he depicts has squandered its original promise as an outward-looking, free and egalitarian democracy, to become a harshly divided society where the government regularly overrides the liberties of its own and other countries' citizens, and most Americans are too introverted, ill-informed or apathetic to care. Many foreigners, Hertsgaard argues, are unaware of these changes, or do not want to believe they have occurred; therefore they are surprised and disappointed when the United States does not behave like the pure, enlightened republic declared by its founders.

Hertsgaard blames the 1980s, in particular, Ronald Reagan, "the most influential politician in America today, the man whose ideology still shapes the assumptions and policies that reign in Washington". Under Reagan, the balance between rich and poor, between business and other interest groups, between pragmatism and principle in American actions abroad, which had more or less held, in Hertsgaard's view, for 200 years, was decisively tilted in the wrong direction.

He is not short of evidence. He cites Reagan's welfare cutbacks and halving of company tax rates, his degrading of political rhetoric with half-truths and evasions, his military machismo, the Iran-Contra scandal ... And Hertsgaard notes how little the tone of American political life has changed since. Even under Clinton, he points out, cruise missiles were launched at Iraq with the memorable justification from the secretary of state Madeleine Albright, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation."

By citing an excess of the Clinton administration, however, Hertsgaard inadvertently exposes a weakness in his own argument. The history of American misdeeds cannot be convincingly confined to the Reagan presidency and those it has influenced. To take two obvious examples from the decade Hertsgaard claims as a lost golden era of sorts, the 1960s, it was President Kennedy whose government encouraged the illegal invasion of Cuba via the Bay of Pigs, and President Johnson who relentlessly prosecuted the war in Vietnam. At the same time, both administrations were initiating reforms at home against racism and poverty of which any progressive government would be proud.

Hertsgaard never quite says it, but it may be that America's benign and malign qualities actually come from the same source: its foundation during the western world's great explosion of self-confident rationalism in the 18th century. Another product of that time was modern France. A favoured theme of American foreign affairs commentators has long been the intertwining of arrogance and laudable achievement in that particular culture. More of that kind of ambivalence - and less innocence - in how the world thinks about the United States might be no bad thing.

It suffices to note that among the bits of evidence cited here for America seeking to override other people's liberties are our activities against Communist Cuba, the Communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, the Communist Sandinistas, and the radical Islamists in Iran. Aid to the Contras served to liberate Nicaragua, but the other three remain to this very day among the most oppressive regimes in the world. Ask any of the millions of Cubans, Iranians, and Vietnamese who fled their native lands to live in America what they think about our human rights record over the past few decades. Ask who's a bigger disappointment, the America which routinely, perhaps even too routinely, intervenes on the side of freedom and democracy, or the Europeans who have sat on the sidelines, suckling at the teat of bloated social welfare states and whining about the cowboy ways of the Americans, who, of course, intervened in Europe three times last century to save them from each other and then paid to rebuild their states. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 23, 2002 11:49 PM