In Defense of America (4 page)

It takes some doing to see the United States as a greater threat than Hitler, but Hubert Beuve-Méry, the founder of
Le Monde,
in May 1944, just weeks before American GIs landed on the Normandy beaches, argued that “The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may, in time, threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of Liberty but they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitude which their capitalism has created.”
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In withdrawing from the American-led NATO command structure in 1966, President Charles de Gaulle portrayed the United States as a threat on a par with the Soviet Union.

The New Pro-American Mood Is Shallow

Many have heralded the arrival of Sarkozy as France’s president and of Angela Merkel as Germany’s new chancellor as the beginning of a new wave of pro-American feeling. Sarkozy, when still interior minister, speaking in the Daughters of the American Revolution hall in Washington, DC, on September 12, 2006, paid the United States all the compliments it could possibly have felt were overdue. “For me,” he said, “the virulence of the commentaries in the press and by the French elites reflects a certain envy, not to say jealousy, of your brilliant success. The United States . . . is the world’s leading economic, monetary, and military power. Your economy is flourishing, your intellectual life is rich, and . . . the world’s best researchers work at your universities, [where] . . . they quickly turn into American patriots.”

Sarkozy added, “I’ve come to tell you that when a young American soldier dies anywhere else in the world, I can’t help but think that he has the same face as one who came to die for us in 1917 or 1944.” David Martinon, then spokesman for President Sarkozy, said in October 2007, “Under his presidency it is no longer taboo to be pro-American and to be French.”
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The newspaper
Le Figaro
elaborated on this shift. “What is new is that France no longer positions herself as a rival of the U.S.,” it wrote. “She doesn’t let herself be locked into a role that should not be hers, as a rallying point for all those who oppose America.”
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Angela Merkel, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in what was then East Germany, has been determined to use her chancellorship to strengthen ties with the United States and to cool them with Russia (Gerhard Schröder, her predecessor, promptly took a job with the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom on leaving office). But these exuberant claims of a new fondness for the superpower should be taken skeptically. They hold true more of the leaders than the public at large (and despite President Sarkozy’s enthusiasm, his own foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, declared in March 2008 that no matter who succeeds President Bush, “the magic is over”).
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For all the efforts of pro-American advocates to distinguish between President Bush and the United States itself, there are signs that most Europeans are not so indulgent. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual who enjoys his status as the national contrarian for being passionately pro-American, told the
New York Times,
“
Non, non, non,
this French pro-Americanism is nonsense.”
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Lévy argues that whatever President Sarkozy might say, the American project of blending together so many different kinds of people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds is essentially hostile to the French idea of what it is to be a nation (a point I shall come back to in the next chapter).

Nor are Spain and Italy sounding pro-American these days, despite their intertwined history and large emigrant populations in the United States. When Condoleezza Rice traveled to Spain in June 2007, her counterpart, Miguel Angel Moratinos, lectured her that the United States would see the error of its ways in its hostility to Fidel Castro; in a widely reported response, Rice, rolling her eyes, silently mouthed to American reporters, “Don’t hold your breath.”

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing about the “recent improvement in transatlantic ties” in December 2007, argued that “This belief is comforting, but it is bound to end in disappointment.” Haass added, “U.S.-European relations are not about to become as good or as significant as they were in decades past. Some of the reasons for this are familiar: social differences, including an unequal emphasis on religion and differing views on abortion rights and the death penalty; lingering anti-Americanism resulting from the Iraq war, perceived American neglect of the Palestinian issue, and both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” But he pointed, too, to “generational and demographic changes on both sides of the ocean.” The generation in Europe that was most pro-American, that had lived through the war, was dying out. As Haass put it, “Fewer Europeans regard Americans as their liberators; fewer Americans view Europeans as their ancestors.”
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The Real Cost for the United States

These attitudes carry a real cost for the United States. Since the Iraq invasion, the starkest rejection of the American alliance was the decision of new left-wing governments in Spain and Italy to pull their troops out of Iraq, as they had promised, to enthusiastic response, in their election campaigns. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist Party prime minister, took out Spain’s 1,300 troops in April 2004, and Romano Prodi, prime minister of a coalition with a strong left-wing faction, pulled out Italy’s 3,000 troops in December 2006. Anti-American attitudes have also, as I have said, taken some of the warmth off the United States’ relationship with Britain, where a politician has little to gain by being as close to America as was Tony Blair.

Meanwhile, Eastern and Central Europe have become distinctly more sour, feeling that their support has been taken for granted ever since they extended a huge wave of enthusiasm toward the United States when the Iron Curtain fell. The Polish government said in January 2008 that it did not regard the United States’ hope of siting ten missiles for its new “missile shield” in Poland as a “done deal,” and that the decision would be made “entirely on Polish national interests,”
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although it has since been more encouraging.

It isn’t just Europe that is behaving this way. Latin America, in a populist mood, has found new inspiration for its traditional America bashing. Venezuela is threatening to withhold oil supplies, while Brazil is blocking the United States’ moves in world trade talks and questioning its attempt to curb nuclear proliferation.

This is the puzzle facing the United States: It stands for Western values and Western democracy; its constitution sets out those principles in language of unmatched power and simplicity; it has gone to great lengths to defend them. Yet, at a time when its allies have the luxury of questioning their relationship with America, they wonder whether they share its values at all. That is what I explore in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

AMERICAN VALUES ARE WESTERN VALUES

Now It Gets Fun!” —that was the headline of the Drudge Report on January 9, 2008, the morning after the New Hampshire primaries, over a picture of the victorious (and startled) Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Drudge was right. The surprise, the adrenaline, the emphatic and unexpected endorsement of the voters —that is the exuberant pleasure of American democracy.

It is not matched anywhere else. India is the only other country attempting something like the American project, of uniting many very different kinds of people within a democracy. Its elections are the world’s most dramatic —a population nearly four times that of the United States, crowded in an area just a third the size, rushing to get to the voting booths. But for all the astounding virtues of Indian democracy —not least that it survives, despite constant predictions of its death —it has not been good at delivering the rights and protections of its own irreproachably idealistic constitution to its poorest people and its minorities.

Nor do American elections have the furtive whimsicality of those in Britain, called at the prime minister’s discretion when he believes the wind is blowing in his favor (as long as it is within five years of the last polls). Instead, the immovable schedule of the election of the U.S. president, the Congress, the state governors, and the half million other elected officials
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in America is the rhythmic beat by which the rest of the world sets its political clock.

The American enterprise can appear anachronistic at a time when countries are shedding fractious provinces or breaking into pieces entirely. But it still represents a profoundly civilized goal: to overcome ethnic and religious differences in uniting people willingly into one country.

These democratic principles, together with the individual rights and liberties set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are America’s proudest possession. They represent the values in which the West says it believes, and which the United States has defended in two world wars. They are worth defending: they are the democratic ideal.

But they are also much rarer than America has recognized, and much more foreign to other countries than the United States has appreciated when it has tried to export those principles around the world. This chapter looks at the difficult journey by which the United States arrived at its own system of government, and why its values and constitution can seem so alien, not just in the Arab world and other noisy centers of resentment of America but in Europe, in countries which say they share its founding principles.

American Values

What is it to be American? Many people would answer that by referring to the values set out on July 4, 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, and eleven years later in the U.S. Constitution. The Declaration of Independence, by which the thirteen colonies severed their ties with the British Crown (and which they approved at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia), begins with a singularly graceful statement of purpose: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” That requirement —to justify their actions, let alone in language of unforgettable power and simplicity —is not one which many nations have felt obliged to observe.

The Declaration continues, in text of unmatchable resonance, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and that among their “inalienable Rights” are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Britain, which has no written constitution and whose leaders occasionally explore the impulse to write one only to back away, might be inhibited, if by nothing else, by the recognition that the best words have already been taken.

This is a statement not just of American values but of what are now Western values —an assertion of individual rights and freedoms. But in saying that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Americans departed from the British prescription of locating ultimate authority in the monarchy (and, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in God). As Jonathan Freedland, the British columnist, pointed out in his eloquent 1998 lament on the failings of British democracy, in the United States, “it is the people who are the authors of their own destiny, they who install governments to act on their behalf,” while “power in Britain comes not from the people but on high.”
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The Declaration’s principles are expanded in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), ratified by the states in 1789. Those texts set out how Americans —or “we the people of the United States” —are prepared to be governed by their leaders: the division of power between the president, Congress, and the courts; the powers reserved to the states; and the rights and freedoms of the individual, and his protections against overbearing government.

It is easy to forget —as did the administration of George W. Bush, it seems, in its approach to Iraq —how difficult the first thirteen American states found it to reach agreement on their own constitution. David McCullough’s astute and moving biography of John Adams is, among other narrative feats, a chronicle of the sheer difficulty of that enterprise —of reaching a balance between large and small states, and between the states and their new federal government.
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One of the most difficult tasks (as Iraq has again unfortunately illustrated) is setting out protections for minorities from the majority, so that democracy does not simply turn into majority rule, or winner-takes-all.

America’s own struggles toward unity (Alaska and Hawaii, the last states to arrive, were admitted in 1959, half a century ago) might also have taught it something about the difficulties it would face in Iraq. That unity was most tumultuously challenged in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, of course. But that war was hardly the final crisis. The civil rights movement of the 1960s tested the principle that if the United States was going to be a single nation, then there were indeed inalienable rights which must hold true within its borders. Those challenges continue today. But for all the difficulties the United States has had in reaching its goal, the vision of the founders represents the essence of civilization: to devise rules to let people live peacefully together and to let minorities live in confidence that their rights will be respected.

Why Does America Seem So Foreign?

The European Union defines itself by those same aims. Its countries have supplied the United States with great pulses of immigration. Yet the enduring theme of its members’ relations with America is that of foreignness. Lives have been spent in analyzing transatlantic differences (and sometimes in exacerbating them). Robert Kagan, the neoconservative commentator, in his bestselling book
Of Paradise and Power,
famously argued that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus,”
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and he has a point, although he exaggerates it. You could group the broad themes of mutual incomprehension into four: size; the American melting pot; the relation between the individual and government; and religion.