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The Many Faces of America
I have traveled around quite a bit in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and China, while living in the Caucuses region and I have met and talked with upper middle class Iranians and extremist Muslims in my work as a missionary. It is from this travel and personal experience that I write the following on the way that world perceives the United States.
America is Hydra:
If you are not on board with America completely, and I mean completely, it is very easy to resent America. American culture, people, business and military are insidious and often seem omnipresent. Even if you successfully resist America politically, you turn around for one minute and you find that American popular culture and technology is undermining you. You cut off one head and the American Hydra produces two more heads for you to fight.
Take for instance the Republic of Georgia in 2005 George W Bush visited the country and the main highway into the Capital is still named after him. After his visit American cars flooded the Georgian market as it suddenly became really easy to ship used and rebuilt cars here. It was not only the car market though, fast food chains started opening up, business investment grew dramatically and News outlets in America suddenly began to invest in and train Georgian media in news and business.
In short time America transformed the Georgian economy and built up the pro-western regime here. By contrast Russia was trying to do the same for little South Ossetia a part of Georgia that the Russian stole in the early 90s. This little territory under the protection of Russia shrank in population, economic output and birthrates. The more Russia poured into the effort the worst the situation in South Ossetia became. A year after the war in 2008 Georgia had completely recovered, entire towns rebuilt, roads improved, businesses restored. In that same amount of time the Russians rebuilt exactly three buildings in one town in South Ossetia. The contrast was painful for the Russians and instructive to others in the region.
America had to make no major policy efforts to build up Georgia, no major bills had to pass Congress and the US media barely noticed our efforts in that country. Which is how America really works all around the world. We are able to constantly help our friends, frustrate our enemies and increase our influence without even trying very hard.
America’s many heads means that price for resisting America is very high. If you look around at our main enemies in the world you see that their media is tightly controlled, their cultures are closed off and in many cases their government policy is based in a large part on deception. One of the reasons for this is that the influence of America is so great that to open up to the world at all opens you up to America. Once you do that there is not stopping American influence from “corrupting” the people and undermining the regime.
It is also part of the story that the common people see this as an American phenomena. Western Europe can have this effect too but many people will point out that they have this effect because they are like America and are allies with America. So if you are a political enemy of the United States, if you are a cultural traditionalist or if you just like your culture to go its own way and without constantly defining itself against and in contrast to America you want America to fail to one degree or another. Opposing America is exhausting and nothing that has gone before in world history really prepares you for it.
America is a Talisman of Freedom, Success and Hope:
I hope you can see why America can seem like Hydra but it also needs to mentioned that America is more than that, it is also a Talisman. I use Talisman instead of symbol because often non-Americans give America or just the idea of America certain magical or at least near magical powers.
America represents political freedom to people but also as a benchmark of success that they measure their own societies against. Not only that but America provides hope to millions of people in tough situations around the world. The last part is probably one of the most extraordinary things about America that a powerful country like America might actually help people that just need help is something people find very hard to believe is real and yet they can point to America acting in this way. Because of that America will often give hope to people in their fight and that hope can sustain movements in vital ways.
By being this Talisman America challenges the core political and often cultural arrangements in a society. Let’s take Iran/Persia for a moment. In this historical context I will be referring to Persia and Persians instead of Iranians. Persians were regional leaders politically, culturally and militarily for centuries. Persians grew accustomed to this position and even in times of weakness they assumed they would return to their dominion soon. In the 19th century as Persia and their traditional rivals the Ottoman’s collapsed Imperial Russia moved into dominance and this was taken in stride. Imperial Russia was understandable, their system non-threatening and their dominance due to a temporary military supremacy. Later however as America and its client state of Israel took over and here was system that threatened everything the Persians knew about State craft. The government was run by the people, their was no state religion or ideology that drove a ruling class and they were willing to trade with anyone. What made it all worse was the America not only threw out everything the Persians knew about state craft and policy they were successful in every way. Wealth, military power, influence, cultural achievements, sports, Americans achieved at everything and the only things Americans weren’t good at were things that Americans did not seem to care about. This was a challenge that any government that ruled Persia, now Iran, would have to deal with. The culture of their people would demand that they challenge America in some way.
One thing that I have learned as missionary is that people learn new things when they are modeled. It is very hard to get a concept that is new to a culture across to them without modeling it. People have trouble imagining things they have never seen before but once they see it they do imagine what that would look like. In many cultures their centuries of experience have taught them that for success you need strong, dictator like rule, an aggressive military, suppression of dissent and the like. America challenges all these assumptions in disruptive ways and provoke the imaginations of the people in ways their rulers dislike.
In many traditionally dominant cultures America is a grave challenge. Persians and others like them know a few things. They know they are healthier, smarter, braver, stronger, and possess a deeper and superior culture to the Americans. I mean have you met the typical American that travels around the world? They are over weight, know little history, loud, rude, arrogant and often have a do-gooder attitude like they can fix things that are broken just because they are Americans. Even in the way that American walk you tell how arrogant and ignorant they are. What have Americans suffered? What have they had to endure? Did they have to survive the Mongols? Where were they when the plagues came and devastated the region? How many times did they have to rebuild their culture after conquest? And yet… and yet Americans are successful and we are not. It is question that eats at the soul of many people.
This leads people in many cultures and different countries to question their rulers and their systems of government. Americans are losers and yet they succeed. If we (whatever race or culture they are) had the same chance as Americans would we not surpass them in everything? What are we doing to hold ourselves back or what are the clever Americans doing to hold us back and hold us down I wonder?
I think it is not impossible to see how the very success and presence of America on the world stage is a threat to dictators and oppressive regimes around the world.
The Practical Effects:
One major practical aspect is that it is very hard to withdraw from the world. It would not be hard to stop being a source of hope for the oppressed. That is fairly easy and would be a great boon to the people that hate us the most. Dictators all over the world would rejoice to know that Americans will never interfere with them and their oppression. We also could withdraw some of our presence from the world and cede more space to our adversaries. So no real problem for us so far. But if we want to left alone and we really want people to stop hating us and looking for ways to oppose we have to start failing.
We have to curtail our culture, clamp down on our entertainment industry, severely restrict our military and even better shrink it by scrapping most of the navy. Then we need to have a stagnating economy or perhaps a shrinking one. We do all that and people all over the world will stop looking at America as a threat and will stop looking for ways to oppose us. People would then take us seriously if we were to say, “If you leave us alone, then we will leave you alone.”
If we attempt to withdraw from the world but remain successful and engaged in trade and in selling our products over seas we will remain a symbol of success. If we maintain a strong military it will be seen as a Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of every dictator, ideology or power opposed to us or our allies. It will not satisfy them that we tell them we won’t use it they will not believe us.
To withdraw and “mind our own business” while remaining militarily strong and economically successful is impossible. Too many State actors and others are invested in seeing us fail. We can give them the space they need to grow and become more powerful, allowing them to choose the time and place of their challenge to us or we can deny them time and space and force the issue before they are ready but conflict will come to us. When you hear people talking about acting in the “American Interest” and “withdrawing from conflict” and “minding our own business” you should know that practically that is impossible. We are engaged in the world and as long as we are successful we must stay engaged. We can try and stop being a source of hope for the weak and oppressed and we can enable the strong and aggressive but that is not really in our interest. It will just give our enemies a window to act in and opportunity to grow stronger since they no longer need to worry about unrest at home or opposition to expansion into minor states in their area of influence.
To really and truly withdraw we must fail. If we want to maintain our success we will and must be engaged in the world. That is the stark reality of the world we live in. America will never be ignored, at it was before World War II, unless we show our selves to be weak and do not present a challenging model of success to the oppressed people of the world.
Published in Foreign Policy
One other note about arrogance and American arrogance in particular. It is simply historical fact that America has never really been beaten. When I say beaten I mean our nation has not been defeated we may have withdrawn from Vietnam but we did not lose territory it was a war we chose to lose. When you lose by choice it is not the same as being forced to lose and surrender even though you would rather fight.
Because of that Americans expect to win and expect to succeed and tend to believe they can fix things. This comes across to many people as being arrogant even though it is really not. I mean people can spot Americans by the way they walk. Americans walk in a confident manner like they always know where they are going and people notice that. I changed the way I walked here in Georgia and everyone thought I was German or Dutch and not an American.
So some of the charge of Arrogance against Americans really is unfair. We just seem arrogant even when we don’t intend to be or desire to be. However when Americans play up the “We really are just that good” attitude, well then the charge really isn’t so unfair is it?
Fair enough, but that wasn’t my point. Maybe I should have found a better analogy. What I’m saying is that luck might figure into an individual outcome, but when you are talking about millions of outcomes (like everything that happens in an entire country) luck evens out.
America is different from everyone else. We are built on an idea, not a land, not a people. America is a nation dedicated to a proposition, as some one once said. Our shared history is one of struggle and success. Nothing was handed to America. Colonizing the New World was risky and hard, but already be 1776, Americans were living longer and having a higher standard of living than the nations from which they came. To become independent, America threw off the most powerful nation the world had ever seen. We made it stick by beating them again in the new century. America has not had trails? The nation was cleaved in two, and Americans fought Americans for the bloodiest years in our history. And from that forge, we arose, freed of the terrible chains of slavery.
America is by no means perfect, but no nation has our relative level of power to the rest of the world and not used it to conquer. We don’t want it. Imagine how much the world would hate us if we acted like China or Russia (those left alive to hate us). If the American people wanted to be a foreign Imperial Power, we could seize most of the world’s resources and put them into service to us. We are not like that. I think that this fact is incomprehensible to most people around the world. They know what they would do with our power, and yet we don’t do it. They cannot understand it, and thus make up tales about what we are really doing, because America cannot really be that good.
Yes it can. Yes it is. And it is the American people, with all their faults, that keeps it that way.
What you are saying here is true. On other hand many different ethnic groups would say that American luck includes not bordering the Mongols in the middle ages, not have a large aggressive power on our border repeatedly invading us, that kind of thing. A lot of groups would say “Geez if Canada and Mexico were our only land borders we would be going like gang busters too.”
That is often what they mean when they talk about American “luck”. However as I have pointed out to people Brazil has nearly all the Geographic advantages that America has and yet they did not develop like America did.
Russia has more resources than any other nation in the world.
@bryangstephens who wrote: America is different from everyone else. We are built on an idea, not a land, not a people. America is a nation dedicated to a proposition, as some one once said. Our shared history is one of struggle and success. Nothing was handed to America.
A key point and one hard for many foreigners to understand. They also often don’t get how hard we work. More than few people I have met essentially imagine the American’s open a money drawer in their home and just take out wads of cash that just appear there because they are American.
Bryan writes: America has not had trails? The nation was cleaved in two, and Americans fought Americans for the bloodiest years in our history. And from that forge, we arose, freed of the terrible chains of slavery.
Trails yes. Have Americans suffered the level of adversity and challenge that most cultures in the world have? No. Our Civil War was bad but it has happened only once the scale of disaster that has hit others makes America look relatively blessed. Could people have had all our advantages and not done as well as we have? Absolutely. Nothing as you said was handed to us.
Bryan writes: We don’t want it. Imagine how much the world would hate us if we acted like China or Russia (those left alive to hate us). If the American people wanted to be a foreign Imperial Power, we could seize most of the world’s resources and put them into service to us. We are not like that. I think that this fact is incomprehensible to most people around the world.
You are very right about this. People find it so hard to believe how we use our power they think we have some kind of conspiracy going on. Some kind of elaborate hoax where we are taking over the world just in secret. People on the border of Russia and China would be the first to agree with though. Georgians joke all the time that God should have let Cuba and Georgia change places in the world and both people would have been happier.
I see their point, but this shouldn’t be too hard to explain: we don’t value ancient land claims because almost all of us are separated from our ancestral homeland(s), mostly by choice.
Also Mongols and Swedes and extreme cold.
Yes Swede are more fun in the modern day. Not so fun in the past when they were killing tens of thousands of Russians for every year for a good lone while. Now I wold find the Swedes to be fine neighbors.
Didn’t they used to be holding beer, instead of orange juice? What’s in the world is happening in Sweden???
Been getting weaker since Charles XII’s day. I mean they took a Napoleonic General as king? Really…
It’s not luck. It’s providence. Don’t worry about it too much. Things are likely to change. Nations rise and fall.
If you think Americans are arrogant, I have to ask if you’ve ever met a German?
Why do people think Americans are arrogant? Is it based on actually meeting Americans? In most cases, I would say it is not. It’s a reaction to American influence. The influence comes from success.
Also, what do you expect when you accuse us of arrogance. Arrogance and jealousy go hand in hand. They feed off each other.
You’re taking that response way too seriously.
Arrogance isn’t a malicious act, it’s just a belief that may not be completely founded in reality – or at least founded in a cherry picked (because confirmation bias) slice of reality. To put it another way, it’s just a set of assumptions about oneself and the world (ie other people), and these generally aren’t consciously chosen or discarded.
Americans aren’t the first to be arrogant and they certainly won’t be the last. In fact they aren’t even the only ones at the moment. Every country or nation has the tendency, and we all express it in some manner or the other. (See how mean I am? I won’t even let you have arrogance all to yourself.)
The thing about arrogance is that it leads otherwise clever people to behave stupidly because it encourages them (us!) to dismiss or discount the facts that don’t align with a set of flattering assumptions. And that’s not limited to how we deal with other countries – it certainly is reflected in domestic policy as well.
Let me put it this way. Australia is the (a) Lucky Country (so far) because:
.
And that’s okay. It’s okay to be lucky, in fact it’s pretty awesome.
The partial most we have in the U.S.A. has been pretty handy, too.
America’s Younger, wilder Brother. Canada is the boring Middle child, of course. India, is the half-sibling from Dad’s mistress. Britain is Daddy of course.
As Babe Ruth is reputed to have said, It ain’t bragging if you can do it.
Haters going to hate, right? But despite my cold bitter soul I still like:
One thing left out of this conversation (though hinted at, in the remarks about “ancient land claims”) is that everyone, in theory, could be American. Yes, yes, I know, a Syrian can become a German…but let’s face it, not really. At least, not yet.
Whereas, for generations, a Syrian, or Italian, or Dane, or Congolese could truly become and be just as American as anyone else. Barack is as American as Michelle, I am as American as Bill Cosby, Anthony Weiner is as American as Condi Rice, Andrew Klavan is as American as Mario Cuomo.
This is true of Australia and Canada, too, but in this they strongly resemble America for the very good reason that they share values and certain features of history (e.g. a pretty short one, at least in terms of European colonization and settlement). Heck, they could be America; Canadians here might object, but how difficult would it really be to just remove the northern border and call the whole shebang the USA?
Which brings me to this: that what gives American power such extraordinary potential—sufficiently so that I’m willing to consider it providential—is that we have been given the unique opportunity to do with power what ought to be done with power. We (albeit imperfectly) give it away.
That is: we defend the powerless
And: we permit, even encourage the powerless to become powerful.
Not by giving from a finite supply, BTW: that conservative economic analogy about dividing a pie versus making a bigger pie applies here, too.
Oh Kate. That is how America is perceived and has been experienced in Europe – and perhaps Japan – but it isn’t how it’s perceived (and experienced?) in Latin America and the Middle East.
I don’t see any of that as luck. That’s a combination of being smart, and just how things are.
The biggest problem with identifying someone else’s advantages as “luck” is that it feeds feelings of victimhood. In my philosophy, you deal with whatever situation you find yourself in as best you can. But there are plenty of people who just want to whine about other peoples’ “luck” (or, as they prefer to put it, “privilege”). It’s just not a useful way to look at the world.
@katebraestrup and @zafar As Zafar points out perception and experience intermingle to cast colored shades over US involvement around the world. So what you right is true. America welcomes everyone into our economic system of choice and the more free market you are the more we bend over backwards to be your friend. At the same time we fight for human rights we like to see religious minorities flourish, people not be oppressed that kind of thing. Americans are also sentimental and our press manipulates us easily with tales of oppression and torture to take on the oppressive torturers. One example is FDR’s desire to suppress as much truth about the USSR as possible afraid that Americans would turn on the alliance even if ht war with Hitler was not over if the truth about the Communist became widely known.
On the other hand in the Western Hemisphere there were two rising super powers Mexico and the US and Mexico misfired. While we kept the Europeans out of South America most of America’s involvement in the South has been to preserve stability and the smooth flow of commerce. We also grabbed land by making Panama free from Colombia though that was more of an isolated incident. Anyway as a dominating power that has the power to interfere and settle disputes we more often then not make everyone upset.
To take one example when the Roman Catholics rose up against the Socialist and atheistic government in Mexico what were we supposed to do? The rebels wanted us to inject ourselves for religious freedom, the Socialist thought we should sell the them weapons for stability. Our business interests in Mexico meant that we could not ignore the problem. We ended up splitting the difference getting business concessions from the Socialists while forcing a settlement that allowed some religious freedom for the Catholics. Our intervention let everyone feel betrayed. But what could we have done? Add to that the Communist narrative that ran through South America putting all our actions in the worst light possible and we get a lot of hatred for us that is probably not deserved. Ask the countries dominated by Russia about how hard South America had when the dominant power is the US. Few countries near Russia would not quickly and happily trade places with countries in South America.
Cont….
Continued from #55.
The Middle East. The Middle East is going through a crisis. Since World War I the Islamic countries have been left behind. This has challenged them to their core about who they are and how they view their own culture. They have been on low ebbs before like after the Mongol invasions and right before the First Crusade and the like but after World War I they were all occupied by foreign powers for the first time. Even after finding themselves floating in oil and rich it has not caused their cultural or military supremacy to rebound. This makes them angry with a desire to look for scape goats. There has to be an external reason for their problems. Their problems can’t possibly or mostly internal.
So they look as Israel created on land conquered from Christians twice and therefor belonging to Muslims forever and ever. This is boil that will not heal. The success of Israel is rebuke to the entire Arab Muslim world that under mines the legitimacy of the Muslim elite in those countries.
Who is Israel’s backer, friend and military supply the US of course. The US has to be behind the problems in the Muslim world in some way.
So when the US offers to have the Muslims power join the world economy and open themselves up to trade and offer to teach about the cultural institutions and other things that would make prosperity possible the inclination of many Muslims is to see this as yet another way to undermine them and weaken their position further. Surely Christian America must be trying to undermine and destroy Islam, since that is what the Muslim would do in America’s position.
The Islamic culture is wounded and hurt and it does not know how to recover and that causes unease and unrest throughout the Islamic world. The position they are in now is very foreign to them and it hard for them to take in how far they have fallen. Plus their popular entertainment constantly shows heroic moments from the Crusades and other wars when the Muslims were winning and the Christians are always shown to be conniving, weak, hypocrites and cowards running before the mighty and honorable Islamic warriors. And the Muslims have to ask what has changed?
Any intervention by America here is bound to be viewed with deep suspicion even if was altruistic and America rarely acts completely altruistically.
Just “how things are” can be luck. All else being equal attractive people earn more than unattractive people. If you’re an attractive person, that’s luck working for you. Nothing wrong in acknowledging it.
And that’s my point – it’s graceless to ignore the element of luck when considering one’s own good fortune. I agree that being a victim and obsessing about someone else’s luck is unhelpful wrt changing one’s own circumstances.
But wait. Sounds like we are trying to do just those things.
It’s certainly been ideological – specifically to keep the communists out – and I think people have not been too fussy about how that was achieved.
(The Dirty War in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, unending war in Central America – 35 years ago I was living in Washington DC, in Mount Pleasant, a hispanic neighbourhood that had many many refugees from Central America fleeing the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador – they’re still fleeing from there.)
Arguably America acted to achieve economic outcomes it believed were for the long term benefit of the people in Latin America (as well as its own corporations, of course) but the price was high, paid by the Latin Americans, and never agreed to. No wonder they remain sceptical about US intentions. Fair?
Their problems really could be due to both things.
ME discontent is not just focused on external actors. From the Tanzimat in Ottoman Turkey (which was also a colonial power, in a lot of ways) to the Ba’ath to the various Islamist movements today, these have focused on changing Arab/Muslim societies (in different ways – Tanzimat and even Ba’ath to more like Europe, our current Islamists’ to more like Muhammad’s Arabia) because of the perceived ills and incapacities of these societies.
Being dominated by the West (or by local corrupt Western proxies) was/is more of a symptom than a cause. And while I disagree with some of the analyses and solutions they’ve generated (turn the clock back, everything will be fine again) the focus on themselves and their own societies is essentially healthy. They continue to see themselves as potential agents of change.
Wrt the Iranians you met in Georgia – Iran’s history does include foreign domination of weak dynasties, it does include the coup against Mossadegh and its impact on representative government, it does include years of the West propping up the Shah and knocking down Leftist alternatives which left guess who the only opposition still standing. These aren’t the only facts, but they are still real facts.