Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) Page 2
Strange as it may seem to Americans, many people abroad feel that despite all our talk of democracy, human rights, and free trade America’s real aim is to control the destiny of other nations in pursuit of its own short-term interests or ideological preoccupations. Examples are legion, as we are invested in some way in almost every country in the world. Take Korea. Americans tend to see it as a country that owes a lot to the United States – for saving the Koreans from the North Korean and Chinese communists in the early 1950s at a cost of 36,000 American dead, and for providing much of the basis of the Korean economic miracle. More recently, Americans have seen themselves as defending South Korea by linking North Korea with the Axis of Evil, and by withholding promised food and electricity aid to the North until it abandons its nuclear weapons programs.
Pleasing and logical as this picture appears to Americans, it can look very different from the other side. While Koreans acknowledge and are grateful for the American sacrifice in their defense, they note that the U.S. action was not 100-percent selfless but was part of a larger policy of containment of communism aimed at protecting American interests. Koreans also point out that after the end of the war, the United States supported a series of brutal military dictatorships that systematically abused the rights of the Korean people without visible protest from Washington. Kim Dae-jung, who has just finished his term as Korea’s president, still walks with difficulty because of his years of torture and imprisonment. While it is true that U.S. troops still face North Koreans across the Demilitarized Zone, it is also true that our troops enjoy a kind of imperial status. One of the biggest U.S. military bases in the world is in downtown Seoul where it is a constant irritant. The recurring incidents of U.S. soldiers accidentally killing Koreans in traffic accidents, assaulting local women, and committing infractions of Korean laws have seldom led to an American’s being thrown into a Korean jail or tried before a Korean court. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and Korea provides that only U.S. authorities are to deal with offenses by U.S. soldiers when they are on duty (in principle, Korean authorities have jurisdiction over off-duty soldiers, but in practice this too is restricted).
As for the U.S. effort to destabilize North Korea, the South Koreans emphasize that they didn’t ask for it and that it conflicts with the ‘sunshine’ policy of the south, which has been trying to build bridges to the north in an effort to achieve gradual change. When I met last year with one of Korea’s top foreign policy officials, he begged me to explain to Washington that South Korea cannot afford a sudden collapse of the Northern regime. ‘We are not West Germany,’ he said, ‘and we cannot afford to absorb the North as West Germany absorbed East Germany.’
U.S. relations with China, a more significant subject for Asia and the world, show a similar disconnect. Although the improvement in U.S.- China ties through cooperation on combating Al Qaeda is one of the bright spots of the War on Terror, U.S. attitudes remain ambivalent. On the one hand we have promoted trade and investment with China, so much so that our largest bilateral trade deficit is no longer with Japan but with China as tens of billions of dollars of U.S. investment have poured into the country. On the other hand, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have tended to shift the focus of our defense establishment toward China as a potential threat because of its growing economy, its rhetoric about regaining its ‘rightful role’ in the world, its nuclear weapons and upgrading of its military forces, and its insistence on eventually raising the Chinese flag over Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province. It was partly as a result of these concerns, and in a state of some schizophrenia in view of the rapidly growing economic stakes that the United States moved ahead with the missile defense deployment and designated China a ‘strategic competitor.’ With regard to Taiwan, U.S. attitudes have been particularly ambivalent. Although we cut off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and affirmed a ‘one China’ policy after President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, we have continued to maintain close economic ties with the island. Moreover, as it has recently emerged from dictatorship into a democracy and has talked of declaring independence from China, U.S. support of Taiwan has become even stronger, with President Bush announcing major new arms sales and emphasizing that the United States would ‘do whatever it takes’4 to defend Taiwan.
In my travels in Asia, I found that these actions were causing more alarm than comfort. Few shared the view that China, with its eighteen ballistic missiles and a defense budget one tenth that of the Pentagon, has either the intent or the ability to become a strategic competitor to the United States in any meaningful period of time. Indeed, the Chinese leaders I met were continually expressing the fear that, in lieu of the Soviet Union as an enemy, America now wants to make China the bogeyman and to ‘keep China down.’ They pointed out that it is not China that has ringed the United States with bases or constantly patrols its coast with spy planes. They also pointed out that China’s emphasis, with enthusiastic support from both U.S. industry and the U.S. government, has been on economic development, which could be retarded by large military expenditures. As one official in Shanghai said to me: ‘We want to sell to America, not attack it.’ Others, including a former U.S. Defense Secretary, noted the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy, pointing out that if we treat China like an enemy it may begin to think it is one. As for Taiwan, many Asians expressed shock that, after thirty years of carefully maintaining a ‘one China’ policy, we might now endanger the stability of the region by changing a position on which our whole relationship with China is founded. Even in Taiwan, a majority does not support independence, nor is there much fear of a communist invasion. Indeed, it is the Taiwanese who are invading the mainland, where they have invested more than $60 billion. Nearly 500,000 have gone to live in Shanghai alone. Some Asians I spoke with wondered whether the United States just needs an enemy.
Many foreign leaders also mentioned another troubling aspect of U.S. unilateralism – inconsistency and neglect. Afghanistan, they pointed out, hardly existed for Americans until 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded and established a puppet communist regime. The U.S. reaction was to fan an Islamist jihad reaction and to fund and arm the Mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden, to oppose the Soviets. Once the Soviets left the country, America lost interest and didn’t say a word when the Taliban forced Afghan women out of the schools, out of employment, and back under the veil. Now, of course, America is again keenly interested. From this perspective, the United States can appear unreliable, selfish, and amora
l.
A similar Janus face is seen with regard to globalization. America’s economic power is as inescapable as its geopolitical presence; over the past fifty years, the United States has become the high priest of globalization, preaching free trade, open markets, privatization, deregulation, and interdependence. When economies like those of Indonesia, Brazil, and Malaysia have gotten into trouble, the United States and the international bodies with which it is closely associated (like the International Monetary Fund) have made emergency loans conditional on an end to subsidies and ‘crony capitalism.’ In endless negotiations with Japan, Korea, and Europe U.S. officials have insisted on an end to protection and subsidies for so-called sensitive sectors, and demanded the opening of markets for rice, beef, citrus fruit, and a host of other products. Preaching ‘trade not aid’ the United States has emphasized free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the best road to development and growth.
So the world was heartily disappointed by the imposition of emergency tariffs on steel imports into the United States in 2001. Even more offensive was the rationale. Steel, said the U.S. government, is a ‘sensitive sector’ suffering from surges of imports. Many around the world who had suffered the browbeating arrogance of U.S. trade negotiators could only laugh. More significant, however, was the U.S. farm bill that sharply raised subsidies for a whole range of American agricultural products. To mention the impact on just one country, as a result of emergency tariffs and subsidies, nearly 75 percent of crisis-ridden Brazil’s exports would not be able to compete in the U.S. market. ‘So much for trade not aid,’ the Brazilians remarked. The situation of Mexico was even more egregious. Despite the NAFTA agreement, strict quotas prevented most Mexican sugar from entering the U.S. market. Meanwhile, Mexican sugar workers lost their jobs as heavily subsidized U.S. corn sweeteners replaced sugar in Mexican soft drinks.
Like trade, global warming has been the object of extensive negotiations over the past twenty years. As the world’s biggest source of the greenhouse gases that contribute to the warming, the United States has been a key player in these talks. While the fact of warming is generally agreed upon, its causes, likely extent, and implications remain matters of debate. Because reduction of emissions could also reduce economic growth, the United States has expressed cautious concern but resisted quantitative targets until more is known. In 1992, the United States committed under the Treaty of Rio to make efforts to retard warming, but determinedly kept quotas or specific targets for emissions reductions out of the agreement. Then in March 2001, the Bush administration turned away from any treaty by rejecting eventual ratification of the Kyoto Agreement on Global Warming.
Popular at home, this move was widely condemned in the rest of the world, especially the argument that the world’s richest nation couldn’t join other countries in trying to stave off potentially severe environmental degradation by reducing emissions because there might be some economic costs.
When President Bush visited Goteborg, Sweden, on June 14, 2001, for meetings with the heads of fifteen European Union countries, he was greeted by hundreds of demonstrators, and the Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson spoke for the European leaders when he told the press the United States was pursuing ‘wrong policies that would endanger the environment.’6
On no issue is the gulf between America and the rest of the world greater than on the Israel-Palestine question. For Americans, Israel is a close friend and ally. Millions of Americans have been to Israel as tourists and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have lived there themselves or have friends and relatives who live there. For many Jewish and Christian Americans, Israel is the Bible’s Promised Land of the Jews. American technology companies have made large investments in cutting-edge factories there. For nearly forty years, the United States has been Israel’s chief weapons supplier, defender, and financial backer. Moreover, in the wake of September 11, Americans have come to see Israel’s struggle with terrorist suicide bombers as like our own war against the terror of Al Qaeda, and President Bush’s demands for an end to Palestinian violence and for new elections to replace the currently elected leaders of the Palestinians (i.e., Yassar Arafat) thus seem quite natural and legitimate in the United States. Abroad, however, several U.S. allies said that according to their understanding of democracy they would deal with whomever the Palestinians elect, including Yasir Arafat if need be. The rest of the world, while condemning the suicide bombings, also notes that the Palestinians have been under occupation for nearly forty years and that Israeli settlements in the occupied territory have grown inexorably over the past ten. This, say many, constitutes a kind of creeping, quiet violence. Indeed, some have likened it to the U.S. treatment of Native Americans during the settlement of the American frontier in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In interviews with me in the summer of 2002, a number of foreign leaders emphasized that calling for an end to Palestinian violence without mentioning Israeli settlements is unfair and counterproductive.
This issue has gone far beyond Israel and Palestine and is seeping into a broad range of our foreign policy concerns. During a recent trip through Southeast Asia, I found that attitudes in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia are rapidly being radicalized. Strategically important and traditionally practitioners of a liberal Islam, neither nation has significant ties with the Middle East. Yet few conversations could get past the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. Every night on television, they see U.S. leaders holding pep rallies with Israeli leaders and Israelis using American weapons to attack Palestinian targets. The result is that many old friends of America conclude that the United States is attacking Islam itself. In Europe, the situation is not so emotional, but an official in Paris remarked to me that, in view of France’s large Muslim minority, ‘U.S. policy in the Middle East could be seen as a security risk by my government.’
Thus, on issue after issue, many of our friends and allies take a point of view almost completely contrary to our own. Are they idiots? Wimps? Corrupt? While it would be comforting to suppose so, the fact is that it is usually we who are the odd man out. As a nation, we are an outlier. We often don’t realize it because of our very size, which tends to blinker our view of others, and of our power, which allows us to assume that our standard or our view is the globally dominant one, or should be. (Thus, on a parochial level, we cling to miles, inches, and Fahrenheit degrees even though the rest of the world long ago moved to the far simpler metric system.) The really perverse aspect of this phenomenon is that because of our power, the rest of the world accommodates us, thereby enabling us to remain blinkered.
While the rest of the world watches America carefully and takes its views into account, Americans are often unaware that other views even exist – or if aware, they don’t care. The thing that most irritates foreigners about American unilateralism is not our conscious policy decisions but the obliviousness behind those policies.
Furthermore, as I shall discuss, our sense of mission and self-righteousness makes it hard for us to hear. On the one hand, we don’t listen very well because we don’t have to, and we tend, in any case, to believe that no one else has much worthwhile to tell us. On the other hand, the rest of the world avoids telling us unpleasant truths because it fears to annoy us. An indication of how blinkered we are is reflected in the results of a massive global public opinion poll done in 2002 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. These results confirmed what I had been hearing in my travels and interviews: namely, that while there is still a reservoir of good will toward the United States, its water level is falling. Two findings, in particular, were significant for my discussion in this book. When asked if America considers others in its policy making, 75 percent of Americans said yes; but in nearly every other country, large majorities said no. A second question asked respondents to give their opinion, first, of Americans as people and, then, of America as a country. The answers showed more positive views of individual Americans than of the country as
a whole. For example, in Jordan only 25 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of the United States, while 53 percent said they liked Americans. Similar figures were obtained throughout the Middle East. All of which seems to confirm that people abroad like us better than they like what we do.
Thus while our intentions are usually honorable, we are capable of making atrocious mistakes. The attacks of September 11 are a perfect example. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have taken a Sherlock Holmes to deduce impending danger from clues that were lying around, even on the desk of our National Security Adviser. But we couldn’t hear because we didn’t think we had to listen. Or think of Vietnam. The French had taken a terrible licking before us – but they were the French. Hadn’t they given up as soon as they got a whiff of German lead in World War II? Besides, we weren’t trying to re-establish some empire. Our motives were pure. We were fighting godless communism and trying to stop the dominoes from falling. There was just one problem: We didn’t have a clue that communism had nothing to do with it. It was all about nationalism and independence, something that we of all people should have understood, but didn’t because we didn’t pay attention.
It was like a personal experience I had as a graduate student in Japan in the early 1960s. I had been studying Japanese for two years, and while not perfect, I wasn’t bad either. One day at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, I asked the information booth attendant a question in Japanese. In English she replied that she spoke only a few words of English and thus couldn’t answer my question. I then turned to my Chinese wife, who did not speak Japanese, and told her what to say. When my wife repeated my question in Japanese, the attendant responded at once, also in Japanese with the desired information. My point is that the attendant knew foreigners can’t speak Japanese, and so couldn’t understand her own language when spoken by someone who did not look Japanese. In the same way we Americans often fail to understand because we project ourselves onto the situation.