And so he did. The United States might be delinquent in its payment of dues to the United Nations, said Helms, but it was not a “deadbeat nation.” It was “nonsense” to think that the country would stand by and accept that the international criminal court could assert jurisdiction over Americans. International law–“quote, unquote,” added the senator–“has been used as a make-believe justification for hindering the march of freedom.” If the United States, as it did during the Reagan years, decided to “lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny,” that was its own, inherently legitimate business. In fact, argued Helms, the United Nations as a whole should be careful that it didn’t get, well, too damn uppity. “The American people,” said Helms, “see the United Nations aspiring to establish itself [as] the great central authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance. This is an international order the American people, I guarantee you, do not and will not countenance.” If the United Nations sought to “impose its presumed authority” on America, Helms concluded, it could face “eventual U.S. withdrawal” from the organization.
The members of the Security Council then took their turn. Firmly, they made their points: Like any other country, the United States had obligations of membership. Collective action could achieve much. Multilateralism was not the same as world government. And in the most dramatic moment of the colloquy, Martin Andjaba, the ambassador from Namibia, reminded Helms that under the Reagan doctrine, “some of us who were legitimate and genuine national-liberation movements were called other names–terrorists.”
It was, in cameo, a demonstration of the way the world is now often supposed to be. Alone stood the United States in the very council where but days earlier France, China and Russia had allied themselves to defeat Washington’s plans for a new structure to oversee the continued disarmament of Iraq. Arrayed against it were the other nations of the world, exasperated and offended by America’s claim that it could do whatever the hell it liked. It’s a familiar script. Ina much-noted article in Foreign Affairs last year, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington dubbed America “the lonely superpower.” “On issue after issue,” he wrote, “the United States has found itself increasingly alone, with one ora few partners, opposing most of the rest of the world’s states and peoples.” It’s not hard to detect a new and rising anti-Americanism at large. French intellectuals, Malaysian prime ministers, Chinese nationalists, British campaigners against genetically modified food and the death penalty–all seem to have a beef with the United States. If those strands of criticism coalesced, they could form a source of genuine tension and instability in the years ahead.
And yet… Truth to tell, there’s another way to look at last week’s extraordinary session of the Security Council. The mood was candid, certainly; but polite; plenty of the council members found much to agree with in Helms’s presentation. For Russia and China both, the chairman’s insistence on the importance of national sovereignty as against multilateralism rang happy chords. And at a dinner the following night in honor of Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who had orchestrated the whole thing, Helms and Andjaba greeted each other like long-lost brothers. The simple idea of an America on its own, with the rest of the world throwing rotten tomatoes at it, just looked too–well, simple. And it is. For countless millions of non-Americans, after all, American products, services and opportunities offer illumination of the path to a better life. The whole question of America’s relationship to other nations and peoples, in other words, is one of nuance.
The old protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons may have gone; still, it’s not hard to find examples of traditional attitudes toward America. Since Alexis de Tocqueville first uncovered the anatomy of the young republic, Europeans have been simultaneously bemused and impressed by the raw-boned giant to the west–the land with muscles but no culture. On the streets of Paris last week, Philippe Revert, a bank inspector, caught that mood perfectly: France, he said, “has more history than the U.S., and so we consider them like big kids.” In Latin America, the old resentments of Yanqui dominance are always close to the surface, and populist leaders know how to play them like a well-tuned violin. Before the coup in Ecuador last week, students protested that the proposed dollarization of the economy would make them an American “colony”; after December’s catastrophic mudslides in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez rejected the offer of American military aid. (Still, Chavez knows on which side his bread is buttered; he may tweak the Americans by saying nice things about Fidel Castro, but his country’s earnings from oil exports depend on the U.S. market.)
Around the world, there was widespread dismay at the U.S. Senate’s rejection last year of the treaty banning nuclear tests, an apparent determination by Washington that the rest of the world could go hang. In Asia, still recovering from a financial crisis that many blame on the way American capitalism was forced on the region, it’s not hard to hear complaints. “There is growing resentment all over the world against American hegemony,” says Jomo K.S., a professor of political economy in Kuala Lumpur. Both Russia and China saw NATO’s war in Kosovo as a willful intrusion of American power into the sovereign rights of independent nations. In Russia’s case, Kosovo merely rubbed salt into a wound exposed by the expansion of NATO to the old communist countries of Eastern Europe. In China, the bombing of Beijing’s embassy in Belgrade didn’t just unleash massive demonstrations against the United States; it also empowered a newly fashionable school of “democratic nationalists” who insist that China should not always dance to the American drum.
These are protests against the “hard” manifestations of American might, expressed in geopolitical and military terms. But with the end of the cold war, they have lost some (not all) of their edge. The United States no longer has to defend indefensible regimes simply because they are a bulwark against communism, no longer has to wheel out the cowboys from the CIA to get rid of an awkward customer. Yet the twin phenomena of globalization and the revolution in information technology have helped create a new form of American dominance, one that Harvard’s Joseph Nye has christened “soft power.” It is the combination of these two sorts of force–one political and military, one cultural and economic–that leads those like French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine to christen the United States a “hyperpower.” Peter Preston, a veteran British journalist, says that the roots of anti-Americanism lie less in objections to America itself and more in the fact that it is “so dominant as a country. It’s reasonable for people to feel a little swamped.” Adds Raymond Seitz, formerly Washington’s ambassador to London, “[The problem] isn’t so much an imperial America; it’s the sheer overwhelmingness of this immense presence.”
Of course, unease at the cultural and economic power of the United States is nothing new; you can find traces of it as far back (at least) as 1851, when Cyrus McCormick’s combine harvesters caused a sensation at London’s Great Exhibition. But in today’s interconnected world, where ideological cleavages matter less than they once did, America’s soft power becomes a ripe target, and not only from French intellectuals concerned that a cartoon mouse and his friends are so powerful that they will pollute the pure cultural stream of Racine, Poussin and Johnny Halliday.
Consider two aspects of modern anti-Americanism: the environment and the death penalty. It shouldn’t have taken last year’s European protests against genetically modified food for Americans to realize that overseas they are regarded as champion enemies of the environment. For greens, says Charles Secrett, the director of Friends of the Earth in London, the United States is a “huge problem… America accounts for just under 4 percent of the world’s population but is responsible for 25 percent of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.” Not only is the United States irresponsible, argues Secrett; it is selfish. Americans have many laws that prevent the despoliation of their own backyard but don’t take their good habits overseas. “At home,” says Secrett, “[the United States] has a lot which other countries should be jealous of; abroad there is a lot for which they are rightly condemned.”
Environmentalism as a source of anti-Americanism–especially among the young and well-heeled–has been around for a while. Foreign opposition to America’s use of the death penalty is only just beginning to register on the radar screens of policymakers. (Nye recently mentioned the issue in a speech to CIA officers, thinking it might surprise his audience, but they knew all about it. European diplomats, apparently, regularly bring up the subject with their American counterparts.) The United States is the only major, rich nation that still executes people, and does so–or so it seems to the rest of the world–with something like relish. In Western Europe, especially–none of whose nations kill criminals, not even terrorists–America’s use of the electric chair, gas chamber and lethal injections is widely seen as barbaric. For Europeans, one of the most salient facts in the biography of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the leading contender for this year’s Republican nomination for the presidency, is that more than 100 men and women have been executed on his watch. Protests against the death penalty are now a staple feature of visits by American leaders to Europe, and the Italian clothes company Benetton is launching an international campaign featuring photos of condemned Americans. The point, says creative director Oliviero Toscani, is to draw attention to the “human rights violations” of the United States.
Yet in an important sense, there’s less to this modern anti-Americanism than meets the eye. In the geopolitical realm, despite the fears of pessimists like Huntington, there is little sense of any organized opposition to American power. Yes, Russia, China and France may occasionally make common cause in the United Nations, but this, argues Nye, should be considered at the level of an annoyance: “There’s nothing there that looks like a serious alliance in the 19th century sense.” One day the European Union may turn itself into a political federation with its own substantial military power. But Europeans aren’t stupid; few of them outside the editorial board of Le Monde Diplomatique dream of rivaling American military and political power, or would wish to spend the billions of euros on arms that would enable them to do so.
Then there’s the economy. Yes, the Internet is world-changing; yes, the merger of AOL and Time Warner was a stunning demonstration of the sheer size of American firms and their ambition. But everywhere, the vitality of the U.S. economy has spawned as many admiring glances as resentment. In Japan, which during the bubble years of the late 1980s enjoyed lecturing the United States on the drawbacks of its lazy, unskilled work force, a different tune is now heard: be more like America. Last week a blue-ribbon commission on Japan’s goal for the next century issued its report to Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. The message: empower individuals, break up the cozy old arrangements that linked big business to the government, relax immigration laws, introduce jury trials, place more emphasis on the teaching of English and the liberal arts. In Europe, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is an unabashed admirer of America’s economic success, based on entrepreneurialism and the rapid application of technological breakthroughs. Daniel Remy, author of a French screed entitled “Who Wants to Murder France? The American Strategy,” says, “It’s about time the French took a little inspiration from the American model.”
Similarly, in the field of soft power, all is not what it first seems. For American culture is not sweeping all before it. Last week, for example, Disney announced that it was closing its three retail stores in Germany. Mickey followed a trail blazed by Bugs Bunny; Warner Bros., too, is closing its Berlin store, the first and only of the 13 it originally planned to open in Germany. With the retirement of Michael Jordan, there is at present no global American sports icon (though if golf were less of a rich man’s sport, Tiger Woods might be one). Few foreigners could care less about last weekend’s American football semifinals: they don’t yell “Go Jacksonville!” in Jakarta. Indeed, the most popular sporting franchise in the world (and the most valuable, given the $1 billion that Rupert Murdoch was prepared to pay for it last year) is not American at all. It’s a British football team, Manchester United, whose fan club has more than 200 branches in 24 countries. Unbelievable but true: the Thai edition of United’s official magazine sells 30,000 copies. Throughout Asia, Japanese pop-culture icons–Pokemon, Hello Kitty–are shoving American ones aside.
Anyway, what is American culture? The United States, says Nye, is a cultural “sponge,” a syncretic society that can assimilate influences from all over the world and send them back home, subtly altered. Pizza: American or Italian? Tacos: American or Mexican? Celine Dion: American or Martian? Then there’s the awkward truth that many of those who supposedly wield “American” soft power do so for foreign masters. Three of the leading “American” music labels–Capitol, RCA/Arista and Sony Music–are owned by firms that are respectively British, German and Japanese. Take videogames– in the eyes of many foreign intellectuals, almost the quintessential way in which American dreck messes up their kids’ minds. Yet the hardware is all Japanese, and some of the most popular software was designed in Britain. Scratch a wonderfully American film like “Leaving Las Vegas,” and you quickly discover it was financed in France.
None of this means that American culture has lost its power. The real point is more subtle: in a globalized world, all culture is becoming a bit American, even as the United States itself becomes ever more open to influences from other nations. Immigrants from India and France–heck, from everywhere–flock to Internet start-ups and then send their electronic messages around the world. In Seattle, Washington, Starbucks imports Italian espresso machines, makes coffee in great big, Texas-size cups and then sees the fashion imitated in a hundred foreign airports. American sitcoms like “Dallas” and “Dynasty” disappear from German TV, to be replaced by homegrown shows that look like and dwell on the same themes as their American precursors.
We can call all these cultural artifacts American if we like; we can deplore them if we must. But as Jesse Helms and the Security Council discovered last week, we all now live on common ground. Here’s the message for the new century: those who hate America hate themselves.
