In Defense of America (18 page)

. . . Or Turkey

Much the same can be said for Turkey, where many feel aggrieved that the United States takes their country for granted despite its extraordinary value as a secular, democratic Muslim country, a supporter of Israel, the only Muslim member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and host to American military bases. Parliamentarians voted in 2003 to refuse to allow the United States to use Turkish territory to open a northern front against Iraq. Although the United States made a last-minute offer of $6 billion in grants or $20 billion in loans, it was not enough to outweigh huge public opposition. But European diplomats in Ankara believed that the support would have been there had the United States spent more time in courting it.

Pick Friends Among Dictators with More Care

While America has neglected valuable allies, it has too generously embraced unpleasant friends. To single out one country as a problem is to repeat America’s own often ridiculous preoccupation with rogue states or leaders. But the United States’ support for Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is an unjustifiable compromise of its commitment to democracy. It is also shortsighted; it ignores the way Pakistan’s military has awarded itself land and lucrative privileges, and become a cause of friction between social groups rather than the solution. Even judged just by the promotion of American interests, the support of such regimes won’t work, given their inability, in the end, to contain their people’s rising frustration.

Drop the Phrase “War on Terror” and Close Guantánamo

Giving up the language of war may be hard for any American president to do; anything that sounds like faltering in the face of the United States’ enemies will carry a political price. But keeping it carries a cost, too. It alienates those in Europe who tend to find the term “War on Terror” an unhelpful conflation of different local threats, and who believe it invests terrorists with heroic grandeur when they should be regarded as criminals.

“The concept of war, which could be discounted in the early months after September 11 as a matter of semantics, is itself a polarizing factor in transatlantic relations,” argues Gary Samore, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, together with colleagues at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London. Samore and his colleagues point out that European countries, with much larger Muslim populations than the United States, are not going to declare themselves at war in a way that offends a large proportion of their own people. Even given the shock to America of September 11, its “overwhelming preoccupation with terrorism that is implied by mobilization for war seems out of proportion to Europeans and many others. Terrorism is nowhere near the top of the list of concerns for most of the world.”
³

Preoccupation with the “War on Terror” has also led the United States into the entirely unnecessary mess of Guantánamo Bay, compromising its own claim to be defending principles of freedom and justice, and being condemned around the world for the sake of a few hundred captives, most of whom it does not have evidence to charge. It should try the captives in its own conventional courts or let them go and shut the camp —surely an irresistibly easy gesture for Bush’s successor to make.

On that note, America should start dealing with Cuba, unwilling host to the Guantánamo camp. To see the world’s superpower squatting on the edge of an island to evade its own laws is too much for the world to overlook. To see America waiting for one man and his brother to die before it agrees to talk to the island’s government takes its behavior from the offensive to the ludicrous.

Take Care That the Visa Regime Does Not Shut Out the Best

On a final note, the United States should take care that the new visa regime prompted by fears of terrorism does not shut out the best. The price the United States pays for rising anti-Americanism may include a subtle component: the students, businesspeople, and visitors who decide, perhaps nudged by the slightest margin of emotion, to throw in their lot with a different country. Their loss will be undetectable in the throngs of people still desperate to go to America, but that does not mean that it will not be real —a drop in the attraction of the most powerful magnet in the world.

The United States, complacent about the strength of its appeal, and righteously fearful about the threat it feels it faces from foreign terrorists, is in danger of repelling or shutting out some of the best and the brightest.

A Warning to Europe

Any successor of George W. Bush will want to seem different. Almost any will sound, in tone at least, keener on working with other countries. But Europe is going to be disappointed if it expects all the things it has disliked about Bush to fall away at the same time. That won’t happen —and it shouldn’t.

For a start, the Bush years have left Americans passionately divided about foreign policy in a way which will complicate the decisions it makes and the message the United States sends to the world. Those in other countries often fail to understand the impact of conflict in American politics, trying to read its policy entirely from the president and ignoring Congress. They may be expecting a simpler face, and a more dramatically different one, than future administrations can possibly present.

Even on Israel, where Republicans and Democrats start from similar positions, America’s stance is a world away from much of Europe. America and Europe do not see the Middle East in the same way, and they are not going to do so. Their aims have never coincided, with the exception of Germany, whose sense of identity is entwined with Israel’s success almost as much as is that of the United States. “The truth is that Europe is not anti-Israel,” Tony Blair argued in an interview with
The Times
in May 2002. “Let’s leave aside Britain for a moment, because we are known as friends of Israel. What is more prominent in Europe’s political culture [than in America’s] is a belief that the Palestinians have a raw deal. But that is not to say that Europe doesn’t agree that Israel should exist.”
⁴

That is the best gloss which could be put on a difference of perspective that has been a constant source of friction. Democratic strategists say that Europe misunderstands them if it expects their party to perform the role that the center-left does in Europe; their affiliation to Israel is as deep as that of the Republicans. If Europe is expecting a sharp change from a Democratic president in that respect, it will be disappointed.

Europe will no doubt get something of what it wants in a president who sounds keener on working with other countries, but that could bring Europe itself new discomfort. It would produce demands —for military spending, for trade concessions —which Europe might not want to meet.

It is an insidious trap for Europe to set: to pretend that Bush was in every respect uniquely offensive, to set hopes for his successor so high, to ignore the real differences of interest, and then to condemn America once again for failing to fall in line with unrealistic expectations that deny that U.S. interests are different from those of Europe.

CONCLUSION: THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

The defense of America I have laid out is an argument for optimism. Relentless news reports of bombs, wars, and fear of recession make it easy to overlook how much has changed for the better in the past two decades, and how much that is underpinned by American actions. The oddity of the attacks on America is that they portray us as living in the worst of times, and yet they are made at a time when much is going well —and America deserves considerable credit for that.

Beyond dispute, Iraq is an ugly, shattered state which showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military rather than advertising its strengths. True, America’s project of exporting democracy has stalled amid derision. Yes, the turmoil of the financial markets seems to challenge America’s great economic achievement.

But those disappointments do not profoundly challenge the principles and goals that have guided the American enterprise at home or abroad. The phrase “the proud American” is a source of limitless irritation outside the United States, but Americans have every reason to be proud. They have devised an enviable and humane way of organizing relations between themselves and built the world’s most successful economic machine. You do not have to say that America has perfected itself —that it has arrived at “the end of history” —to acknowledge that achievement. It is impossible to overstate the influence of that record outside America’s borders, in many of the dramatic changes for the better in the world of the last two decades alone.

The rise of China and India, the hundreds of millions of people who have been taken out of poverty in that time, the peaceful folding-in to Europe of former Soviet bloc countries, the opening up of the Soviet and Chinese markets which were formerly closed, the signs of progress and democracy in about half of Africa after decades of paralysis —these are astonishing developments, within less than a generation. In just five years, from 1999 to 2004, 135 million people stopped living in extreme poverty (living on one dollar a day or less). Almost half the world’s population lives in a country growing at 7 percent a year or more; those economies will double in size in a decade. In the past twenty years, such changes have put in reach of billions of people a life of which their parents could not have dreamed. The United States can be credited with having brought about some of that change, by the attractions of its own success and openness, as well as by the direct benefits to others of its economic growth. Resentment of America has risen, but more have been converted to American principles of organization.

For some, this record of increasing prosperity means little when set against the troubles that dominate the headlines —in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia —troubles, which, they argue, America has helped inflame. Of course, those threats are very serious. But at the moment, it is striking how contained they have remained, often with the help of America’s presence. “Taliban with nukes,” many call Pakistan, with unjustified exaggeration, ignoring how much of the country still works well. “The cauldron of conflict in the region,” some have called Iraq after the American-led invasion, predicting a spreading conflagration that has not yet happened, however much the outcome has strengthened Iran’s hand. So far, the troubles in these countries affect their own people more than any others, although there is justified worry that they could spread. Terrorism might make people in affluent countries feel directly under threat in a way that they were not before, but the real risk to their lives, or even lifestyles, is small.

That is not to make light of the horrors for those living in turmoil, nor to dismiss these upheavals as “small wars.” But many can be contained, even if a political settlement and real peace take far longer, and even if the potential for conflict to spread wider remains a risk. Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone are the examples just from recent years. Those who look back with nostalgia to the supposed simplicity of the Cold War, arguing that it kept a lid on such conflicts, ignore how many battles were sparked as the superpowers jostled for advantage.

Many would seize on environmental worries —and American pollution —as the next threat to this picture of optimism. Perhaps; and the case for action on climate change is beyond dispute. Population growth and the admirable desire for development in poor countries will push up carbon emissions. Yet the history of societies’ reaction to large threats, environmental, medical, or political, is indeed to react late but then to move with ingenuity and speed. That is certainly America’s own tendency. You have to take an extraordinarily bleak view of the innovation of the past two centuries, and of the leaps in sophistication, to think that people will find no solutions. It is too magical, too punitive, and too moralistic to pronounce that the self-indulgence of humanity (or even just of America) has unleashed natural forces that cannot now be controlled and whose effects cannot be mitigated.

Many who take that pessimistic view about the environment seem to be hoping for confirmation of their underlying belief that there are inevitable limits to growth, whether imposed by radical climate change, exhaustion of natural resources, lack of water, or soaring population. Conflict will inevitably follow, they maintain; it is now a regular assertion in British government policy that climate change will cause the wars of the future. The potential for this is there, clearly, but again, this prophecy seems driven by a bleak view of people’s ability to avoid conflict. Prosperity and development are easily blamed for causing clashes, but they also create the conditions of hope and optimism which make countries able to compromise, within their own societies and with one another.

That is the United States’ own experience. For all the caricature of its critics that it is a society riven with racial hatred and historic guilt over slavery, unwilling to pay for the medical treatment of its poorest, unable to face the rising cost of its elderly, it has taken huge steps toward reconciling these old conflicts.

It might seem incongruous to point to world stock markets as a barometer of well-being. But they do express investors’ carefully considered view of future growth and welfare. The calculation tries to take account of all the threats and uncertainties I have mentioned, from the price of oil, to global warming, to the risk of war or terrorist attack. In spring 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was still significantly above the level before September 11, 2001, despite the slump which immediately followed that attack, the end of the technology boom, and the slowdown of the American economy in 2008. That represents investors’ belief that the prospects for prosperity and stability are no worse now than they were before the attack that so changed America’s view of itself and its enemies.

Iraq is largely to blame for the blow to American confidence in the twenty-first century. That is deserved; however great the national trauma of 9/11, it was a profound misjudgment to direct the retaliation at an unconnected country, and a cascade of other misjudgments then followed. But the second tragedy of that invasion, after the grief and fear it has caused to Iraqis, would be if the United States were to lose confidence in the value of promoting its own ideals and principles of government.