Blinded by its might

LONDON, Sept. 9, 2002 - When Tony Blair’s pollsters recently sought to explain the British prime minister’s sagging popularity, one of the reasons that surfaced in a secret Downing Street survey came as no surprise: George Bush. After Sept. 11, Blair and other U.S. allies have found that a cozy relationship with the world’s only superpower is no longer an asset.

Rather than touting the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, Blair is battling headlines that call him “Bush’s poodle.” In a recent newspaper poll, 54 percent of the respondents saw Blair as a White House lapdog.

Across the English Channel, other leaders aren’t faring much better. Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, desperate for a gain in September polls, declared that Germany would not be available for “adventures” with the United States — a reference to Bush’s attempts to win support for a war on Iraq.

Never have relations with the United States played such a prominent role in domestic politics in Europe — and farther afield. And never has the gap between America’s self-image and its image abroad been so great.

Global do-gooder
America views itself as a global do-gooder, gracing the world with homegrown democracy and capitalism for all. The White House tells Americans that nobody — and nothing — will stand in the way of the American mission to rid the world the kind of bad guys who turn planes into missiles.

But a year after 9/11, the United States is running into trouble as it dominates foreign battlefields with the swagger of the world’s only superpower.

Supercharged unilateralism, as analysts call Washington’s post-9/11 attitude, is actually straining ties with countries on whom the United States will inevitably depend as the war on terror presses on.

Can the United States go it alone? Militarily, America has no peer. But 9/11 has made the United States vulnerable — to terrorists, of course, but also to a debunking of the theory that the rest of the world regards America as highly as it regards itself.

That image certainly got the nation through the Cold War. The Soviet Union’s “evil empire,” as President Reagan put it, was no match for capitalist democracy. But much has changed since communism’s collapse in 1991. With no nemesis or proxy battles left to fight, the United States has become a global super cop.

Tomahawk diplomacy
People in places like Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia have come to know American foreign policy through the nose of a Tomahawk cruise missile — a phenomenon that put the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world on thin ice well before Sept. 11.

Washington’s unwavering support of Israel, to name one example, has deeply frustrated Arab states for years. More recently, in Europe, where the White House traditionally counts its strongest allies, the Bush administration soured relations by backing out of treaties on global warming and arms control. Protectionist tariffs on European exports, which cost U.S. allies billions of dollars in lost trade revenues, won Washington few friends.

And exported Americana, from McDonalds fast food joints in Cairo to Hollywood films in European theaters, reinforced the impression that an arrogant America made little effort to understand the rest of the world.

Frustrations resurface
The events of Sept. 11, to say the least, came at a bad time for America’s image problem. Yes, the initial outpouring of support from around the world was heartfelt. But the same old frustrations with Washington’s high-handed approach to the rest of the world resurfaced in no time.

Most worrisome is that these days the criticism comes from some of Washington’s most important allies overseas. Javier Solana, to name one, is the European Union’s defense and foreign policy chief. He served as NATO’s secretary general during the 1999 war on Yugoslavia and took a beating from his EU colleagues for his perceived pro-U.S. stance.

Writing in a newspaper commentary earlier this year, Solana couched European backing of the U.S. response to 9/11. “Europeans supported the use of force and still do,” Solana wrote. “But they make two points, which bear repeating. The first is that a military response alone will not solve the problem of terrorism. Europeans have learnt this lesson. The second is that even the strongest country in the world needs partners and allies, not simple followers.”

With the White House and Pentagon eyeing more targets in the war on terrorism, fair or not, the image of America as a global bully is what sticks. And while Washington tells Americans that the United States will “win” the war on terrorism, for many in the world the victor and the villain will be one and the same.