POL - Anti-Americanism rears its ugly head

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Sunday Times

Anti-Americanism rears its ugly head

Like most prejudices, anti-Americanism is usually immune to rational engagement. It is the one fully fledged bigotry still allowed, indeed celebrated, by the left - and from Polly Toynbee to Jeremy Paxman it is thriving.

Last week Toynbee likened the United States to an "evil empire", equating George W Bush's America to Brezhnev's Soviet Union. The Independent described Bush as "a man determined to visit greater misery on the generations to come". A typical e-mail from an English friend this week asked me about "the Madness of George II".

European papers were even more apoplectic. Accusations of American arrogance and truculence and isolationism are still ringing through the international airwaves.

It may be foolish to engage those whose biases seem immune to reason, but what the heck. Nothing the Bush administration has so far done comes even close to justifying this kind of hysteria. Something else is driving this panic - and it has nothing to do with any rational analysis of America's evolving role in the post-cold war world.

Some of it is simply ignorance. It is still conventional wisdom among some commentators in Europe that George W Bush "stole" the presidency. The least informed assert that Bush's brother Jeb put the fixed the election in Florida. Others point to nefarious attempts to squelch the black turnout and to rig the recount.

Sorry, but these are fictions. Last week the most comprehensive media recount of every single hanging, dimpled or punctured chad in Florida came to the conclusion that Bush's real margin of victory was more than three times the official 537-vote margin.

Black turnout in Florida in 2000 was up 70% over 1996 - hardly evidence of voter suppression. No serious analyst of American politics believes that the governor of Florida has any influence over the recount procedures of the Democratic party-controlled electoral boards that handed Bush victory. This is paranoid flim-flam recycled as analysis.

Then there is the pollutant president - the notion that oilman Bush cares not a whit about the environment as long as his smoke-stack industry backers are happy.

Again, this has the pleasing ring of any stereotype. But it has little to do with reality. Bush did indeed reverse his campaign position on carbon dioxide - but his position was further to the left of even Al Gore and was barely noticed in the press at the time.

His announcement on Kyoto was a simple recognition of reality: that there's no way on earth that the United States (with its largest state, California, in the grip of an energy crisis) could reduce its CO2 emissions by up to 40% in 10 years.

Every grown-up European politician knows this, just as they know there is no political cost in bashing Uncle Sam for domestic purposes.

And where is Europe anyway? Not a single leading country has even come close to ratifying a treaty the Europeans currently describe as the only thing that stands between us and climactic Armageddon.

Pots and kettles, anyone? Asking a leading country to forgo up to 2% of economic growth every year for a decade in pursuit of a theory that has as many holes as the ozone layer is at best a gesture in grandstanding. At worst, it's pure cant.

Then there's the nutty notion that the United States is embarked on some kind of suicidal mission to annoy every ally, rankle every rival and humiliate every underling on the planet.

Where on earth is the evidence for this? National Missile Defence, as its title implies, threatens nobody. And it's a truly surreal view of foreign affairs which believes that a country should still abide by an anti-ballistic missile treaty negotiated at the height of the cold war with a country, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists.

Should national defence be based on diplomacy 30 years old, dragged from a world unrecognisable today, based on technology devised before the personal computer was invented? Please.

As for North Korea and the Middle East, what we are seeing is not some resurgence of American arrogance but its opposite. Washington no longer thinks it has an obligation to reunite the two Koreas on a timetable not their own, or to cozy up to a dictatorship that has foisted famine and tyranny on its people for decades. Ditto the Middle East. Eight years of force-feeding "peace" has ended only in intensifying war there.

These strategic withdrawals can be debated on their merits. What cannot be debated is that they are some function of a new and truculent "evil empire". If anything, they are a function of the reverse: a newly humble American republic.

Where Bush can be faulted is in public relations. His tendency is to act first and explain later. He is a businessman, not a counsellor. He could put things a little more delicately. There was no need to state so emphatically in his Kyoto press conference that his obligation is to Americans first. This should go without saying. Ditto his internal formulation that China is no longer a "strategic partner" but a "strategic rival".

When dealing with China, such language is counter-productive. But look at what he does, not what he says. The spy-plane stand-off showed a new administration adept at crisis management, firm in refusing to apologise for something that merited no apology, but flexible and calm in dealing with a regime that, like all communist dictatorships, has no respect for truth . This is the real Bush.

It's easy to misjudge him at first. Heaven knows, I did. But it's an error worth correcting.

In any case, this recent outburst has little to do with Bush or with the United States. Since the end of the cold war, the rest of the world has slowly nursed its resentment at American success. For the past 10 years a deregulated, free-trading, free-market society has left its economic rivals in Europe and Japan in the dust.

By default, it is also the strongest military power on the planet. Even in a crisis like the current one with China, Beijing knows deep down that it has far more to lose than Washington if a real dust-up occurs. Similarly, the Europeans know they can get little done without America, and chafe at the imbalance.

For a while, Bill Clinton's superb seductive skills placated America's allies and foes with his usual snake-oil charm. But eventually the underlying envy asserts itself. It doesn't take a genius to see the connection between anti-Americanism and the attempt to create a European federal superstate. They are two sides of the same coin - a coin best described as resentment.

It may be emotionally satisfying but it is no substitute for grappling with real problems at home and abroad with honesty, frankness and common sense.

For those unfashionable virtues, alas, you now have to go to Washington.

Andrew Sullivan

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2001

Answers

Toynbee is an idiot. Sullivan isn't. I like him.

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2001

He's a good friend of Jonah Goldberg's. (Jonah is Lucianne's son; he writes for NR, which you probably already know.)

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2001

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