Why the US needs the World by Graham Barrett 2:23pm 24th Jan, 2004   January 24, 2004 (Published by The Age).    As George Bush recommits his presidency to making the world safer for Americans, while warming to the challenge of landing an astronaut on Mars, someone needs to bring him down to earth.    More work has to be done in learning why the world's leading power seems so widely despised, yet Bush is reduced to saying: "I am amazed, I am stunned, I just can't understand."    The atrocities of September 11, 2001, brought sympathy to the Americans in their time of distress. We were all amazed and stunned then. But now the streets of many countries - Western as well as Islamic - are populated with protesters bearing placards saying, "Bush - terrorist-in-chief."    No one seems to demonstrate against Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. It is all about the US - and especially its President. Are we so smug in our post-Cold War civilisation that everything that goes wrong in the world has to be the fault of its most prominent expression?    Bush reaffirmed in his State of the Union address that bringing freedom to the Middle East is the key to American security. But the US cannot expect to start remaking the world in its own image if that image is partly the cause of the problem.    When Bush contemplates the surge of anti-Americanism in even the few countries now closely allied to the US, it may be that he fails to understand how the US must also change if it is be respected.    Bush thinks that the world should love America. Yet the world never loves the dominant power of the day. Respect is the emotion to be cultivated. It cannot be imposed, even with an all-powerful military.    To earn respect, then, what does the US need to do? As the dominant power it has to lead by example, as it did so capably after World War II. It has to show that it is a global good citizen, even when it hurts.    Its campaign to make the world safer for Americans carries a risk of making it more dangerous.    Americans are only as stable and prosperous as the world in which they are ubiquitous. The US does not stop at the Canadian border or at the Rio Grande. It doesn't stop anywhere in a century where globalisation has become another word for Americanisation.    This means that Americans have to stop being uninterested in the world, and therefore insensitive to its complexities and diversity, and get a grip on a reality in which they are an intimate part of the global condition, not an aloof exception to it.    "Oh, would that some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us," Robert Burns wrote. Granted this power, Americans would glimpse the strongest country in history as a place where, according to the National Geographic Society, nearly nine in 10 young Americans are unable to locate Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, and where another poll indicates that every other American thinks Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11.    Yet some of those same young Americans are fighting and dying to bring freedom to these very countries, a task for which they are ill-prepared. In the American educational system, the study of geography has been airbrushed into history and history is something that you delete before exiting the internet.    So murky is the global picture that most Americans, according to surveys, believe their country gives vastly more in foreign aid than it does. Faced with a lethal threat to American lives from extremism in the Middle East, Washington spends tens of billions of dollars on military means of countering it - but in 2002 only $US25 million ($A32 million) on outreach programs in the Islamic world.    Bush is himself a product of this famously inadequate preparation for taking on the world. Before entering the presidency he had visited only two other countries. This was sufficient for him to develop a conviction that the world is a dangerous place with many bad people and that the US is a uniquely just power that must use its might to set and enforce the rules.    The most powerful leader to walk the earth may as well be from the moon now that he can only travel in a bullet-proof cocoon, rendered opaque by his decision to eschew newspapers and television news and rely entirely on briefings from his National Security Adviser.    American television news is no loss in an age where the "World in a Minute", so the networks are told by their pollsters, is all that the public can tolerate. In the age of the information revolution, Americans beyond the coastal cognoscenti are as ignorant of the world as the world is obsessed with the US.    A reading of history shows that dominant powers tend to become so engrossed with themselves that they lose perspective. This is what is happening with the US as it strives to cope with a horror of terrorism in which its campaign to make the world safer for Americans carries a risk of making it more dangerous.    Bush wants to bring democracy, the rule of law and wider education to the Islamic world even as his Administration reduces freedoms and justice at home, while remaining oblivious to the dangers of continuing to raise young Americans who know little or nothing of the world and are liable to repeat the errors of the past.    Much dislike of the US is focused on what the Carnegie Endowment scholar Minxin Pei describes as the way American nationalism tends to undermine American moral authority abroad.    "People in other countries immediately spot the inconsistency, contradiction and hypocrisy between professed American ideals and actual American policy," he notes.    As the recent Pew Global Survey of attitudes to the United States shows, anti-American feelings are often expressed by people who share American values. A similar paradox applies to the United States as destiny of choice for millions of people aspiring to a better life.    Such are the inevitable contradictions for the dominant country and culture, with all those global responsibilities to pursue amid the difficulty of exercising power while maintaining moral stature.    The US saved the world from communism, but at the price of compromising its values at key points, along the way from Chile to Cambodia. It is now engaged in saving the world from terrorism, and is already seeing some of its moral standards under challenge as a result.    We must hope that it wins this war, too. But the costs are already becoming evident. While the American people possess high ideals and a strong belief in their country's righteousness, their detachment from the world spares them from seeing themselves as others see them.    The lesson of the Bush presidency is that in meeting its global challenges, the US is only as effective as its relationships with other countries and societies. The US needs the world as much as the world needs the United States.    (Graham Barrett was an external affairs adviser to the World Bank in Washington 1995-2003 and is a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor of The Age).
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