In Defense of America (19 page)

It might now temper that with more realism, more tact, and an acknowledgment that it has not perfected its own government. But after a century of success which was rightly called the American Century, the United States has every reason still to advocate the American way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks above all to Geoff Shandler, my editor at Little, Brown, and to Ed Victor, my agent, for their enthusiasm for the idea. I owe Geoff particular thanks for his shrewdness in bringing the deadline forward, and to his colleagues Junie Dahn, Karen Landry, and Betsy Uhrig for their patience, precision, and speed in making the production possible in such a short time. At that point I should perhaps thank Bill Gates for creating the software — and the international near-monopoly — to make the layers of transatlantic editing so effortless.

Deep thanks also to my editors at
The Times,
James Harding, Robert Thomson, and Peter Stothard, who have provided hours of congenial and stimulating debate on just these topics — and who are staunchly in sympathy with those who try to defend America. Thanks, too, to Ben Preston, who as an endlessly energetic deputy editor of
The Times
commissioned many of the pieces which led to this book, and to my colleagues Michael Evans, defense editor, Zahid Hussain, Pakistan correspondent, and Stephen Farrell (now in Baghdad for the
New York Times
), who were generous in passing on their specialist knowledge with such enthusiasm. Also to Daniel Finkelstein, op-ed editor, for such reliable willingness to argue any point with passion, and Gill Ross, for sharing an office with me with such good humor and having to hear too many yelps of frustration about the process of finishing the text.

Most of all, perhaps, I should thank my colleagues Tom Rhodes and Ian Brodie, who shared the Washington bureau of
The Times
from 1996 to 1999 and who were such enjoyable company in the endgame of the Clinton administration. Tom, with laconic understatement, greeted me as I walked into the office on the morning that the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke by holding out the front page of the
Washington Post
and saying, “There’s this,” knowing that it had smashed all our plans for the week (and for the year, as it turned out). Ian, who sadly died in May 2008 and is much missed, kept us permanently alert by his propensity for proposing “to dash off a little piece, something to stop my fingers rusting up”; we would open the paper the next morning to find that a wickedly written anecdote about Strom Thurmond or another overcolorful Senate figure dominated the pages, while our stories were consigned to the margin.

I’m enormously grateful, too, to those friends who gave encouragement and read early sections: Professor Diane Roberts, now at Florida State University; Carla Power, Daniel Wolf, Shami Chakrabarti, and my brother Bruno, living in New York. Also to Ann Satterthwaite, a warm friend and neighbor in Washington, DC, who helped me fight off jet lag sitting up through the Obama-Clinton primary results, and to Maureen Howard and Mark Probst, who kindly had me and my daughter to stay in New York while I was finishing the proposal for this book.

On a professional note, there are many in the British Foreign Office, Downing Street, and the State Department, and the serving military of both countries, who would not want to be thanked by name; if they will forgive me a collective thanks, it is warmly given. Moving on to those who are inured to being professionally thanked and will not take it as implying anything about their own views, I am particularly grateful to a sequence of British ambassadors in Washington for conversations about transatlantic relations: Lord Kerr, Sir Christopher Meyer, Sir David Manning, and Sir Nigel Sheinwald, and to Sir John Sawers, British ambassador to the United Nations. Also to Robert Tuttle, U.S. ambassador in London, and to Gérard Errera, France’s ambassador; Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s, and to Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s high commissioner, for many thoughtful comments in the years after September 11, 2001. I must add to that Devon Cross, for bringing such an impressive and timely list of those involved in policymaking in Iraq and beyond to her Policy Forum in London; similarly, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former British ambassador to the United Nations and now director of the Ditchley Foundation (of which I am a governor), for invaluable conferences on the same theme; also Dr. Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, and Dr. John Chipman, director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, for attracting a constant stream of speakers of the kind who make London an unmatchable place from which to write about foreign affairs.

For comments with the general thrust of “it’s not that simple,” I should like to thank Mariot Leslie, Lieutenant-General Jonathon Riley, Daniel Bethlehem, and Antony Blinken; for undiluted exposition of their views, Tom Burke, on the environment, Colonel Dwight Sullivan, on the Guantánamo military commissions, and John Bolton, on Iran. I am enormously grateful, too, to the help from fellow journalists and from academics, particularly Carol Rosenberg of the
Miami Herald,
Dan Balz of the
Washington Post,
Michael Goldfarb, Stephanie Koury, Dan Plesch, and Charles Ferguson.

I am grateful above all to my parents not just for provoking this —I can’t say inspiring it, because they may well disagree with the text — but also for looking after my daughter when deadlines loomed (and I wouldn’t want to miss a chance to thank the BBC’s exceptionally intelligent CBeebies Channel for young children). On that note, I have to thank Laura for putting up with the enterprise with more patience than a five-year-old need do, and also for her interested and quizzical first reactions to the United States. After inspecting Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, she wondered why so many dinosaurs had lived in New York; during the 2008 primaries, she suddenly declared (with no parental guidance, I must say), “I want the girl to win.” I couldn’t face telling her that, of all the ways in which America confounds its admirers and critics abroad, its regularly startling choice of presidents tops the list.

NOTES

Chapter 1: Why America Needs a Defense

1. Antony Blinken, discussion with Bronwen Maddox, November 2006.
(back to text)

2. Said during an interview with Bronwen Maddox for
The Times,
May 5, 1998.
(back to text)

3. Matthew Parris, “Yes, America’s My Friend. Or Is It? Suddenly I’m Not Sure,”
The Times,
January 13, 2007.
(back to text)

4. David Miliband, discussions and speeches on democracy, early 2008.
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Chapter 2: Unloved, or Simply Loathed

1. For example, among Lewis’s many books on the theme,
What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
(back to text)

2. Marina Warner,
New York Times Magazine,
June 8, 1997.
(back to text)

3. Josef Joffe, “America the Inescapable,”
New York Times Magazine,
June 8, 1997.
(back to text)

4. Nicolas Sarkozy, speech at the invitation of the French-American Foundation, Washington, DC, April 18, 2007,
http://www.ambafrance-us.org/news/
(under “France/U.S. Relations”).
(back to text)

5. Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, June 2007,
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=256.
(back to text)

6. Ibid.
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7. Ibid.
(back to text)

8. Transatlantic Trends 2007,
http://www.transatlantictrends.org.
(back to text)

9. Margaret Drabble, “I Loathe America, and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World,”
Daily Telegraph,
May 8, 2003.
(back to text)

10. Justin Webb, quoted in “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the Twenty-first Century,” report by the BBC Trust, June 2007.
(back to text)

11. BBC online debate on anti-Americanism, April 16, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4881474.stm
.
(back to text)

12. Michael Werz and Barbara Fried, “Modernity, Resentment, and Anti-Americanism,” in
Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes,
vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007).
(back to text)

13. Tony Blair, interview with Robert Thomson and Bronwen Maddox,
The Times,
May 21, 2002.
(back to text)

14. Peter Beinart,
New Republic,
July 2, 2001.
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15. Peter Schneider,
New York Times Magazine,
June 8, 1997.
(back to text)

16. Alexander Stephan, ed.,
The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism After 1945
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
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17. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” 1944.
(back to text)

18. Hugh Wilford, “Britain: In Between,” in
The Americanization of Europe,
25.
(back to text)

19. Walter Mead,
Foreign Affairs,
March/April 2003.
(back to text)

20. Quoted in Jean-François Revel,
Anti-Americanism
(San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 52.
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21. David Martinon, quoted in the
New York Times,
October 28, 2007.
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22.
Le Figaro,
August 28, 2007.
(back to text)

23. Bernard Kouchner, interview with Roger Cohen,
International Herald Tribune,
March 12, 2008.
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24.
New York Times,
October 28, 2007.
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25. Richard Haass,
Financial Times,
December 19, 2007.
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26. Comments by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in January 2008, including Sikorski, January 5, to the Polish paper
Gazeta Wyborcza:
“This is an American, not a Polish project.”
(back to text)

Chapter 3: American Values Are Western Values

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 1992,
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/cb95-18.txt
.
(back to text)

2. Jonathan Freedland,
Bring Home the Revolution
(London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 19.
(back to text)

3. David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
(back to text)

4. Robert Kagan,
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
(New York: Knopf, 2003).
(back to text)

5. U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census, CIA World Factbook.
(back to text)

6. Michael Werz and Barbara Fried, “Modernity, Resentment, and Anti-Americanism,” in
Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes,
vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007).
(back to text)

7. Jack Straw, said to Bronwen Maddox on Straw’s chartered flight.
(back to text)

8. Office of Immigration Statistics,
2006 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,
“Persons Obtaining Legal Permanent Resident Status by Region and Selected Country of Last Residence, Fiscal Years 1820 to 2006.”
(back to text)

9. Giles Whittell,
The Times,
July 7, 2007.
(back to text)

10. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” February 25, 2008,
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/743/-united-states-religion
.
(back to text)

11. George Weigel, February 22, 2006.
(back to text)

12. The legislative program of parliament is set by the government, and if the government’s party has a majority in the Commons, its bills will pass. The House of Lords, the other chamber of parliament, has not been able to veto legislation since the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949; it can only revise and stall it. No monarch asked to give royal assent has threatened to withhold it since Queen Anne in 1708.
(back to text)

13. Said in conversation with Bronwen Maddox.
(back to text)

14. Fareed Zakaria,
Newsweek,
January 14, 2008.
(back to text)

15. Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, interview with Bronwen Maddox,
The Times,
May 27, 2005.
(back to text)

16. Said in conversation with Bronwen Maddox.
(back to text)

17. Ramachandra Guha,
India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
(back to text)

Chapter 4: For Richer, For Poorer

1. George Soros, “The Worst Market Crisis in Sixty Years,”
Financial Times,
January 23, 2008.
(back to text)

2. The Coca-Cola Company, Annual Report 2006, Form 10K.
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3.
Fortune,
July 23, 2007.
(back to text)

4. Gunnar Öquist, October 4, 2006, when America won all the science Nobel Prizes that week.
(back to text)

5. Stefan Theil,
Foreign Policy,
January/February 2008.
(back to text)

6.
The Economist,
January 31, 2008.
(back to text)

7. Said at a conference of the Social Democratic Party, of which Müntefering was chairman, April 13, 2005.
(back to text)

8. Martin Wolf,
Why Globalization Works
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
(back to text)