TY - JOUR
AU - Hook, Steven W.
AB - Many uncertainties will confront the new US administration as it succeeds that of President George W. Bush. But one reality is clear: the United States will face enormous difficulties reviving its global stature after years of estrangement from its international community. Rejoining this community, once dismissed by Condoleezza Rice as a romantic illusion, is no longer a strategic option, but a necessity for a superpower running the risk of imperial overstretch. The nation's overseas favorability ratings plunged in 2003, due in large part to its unilateral and preemptive invasion of Iraq. Since then, most public opinion surveys report that a minority of citizens hold a favorable view of the United States. Common complaints about the US government involve its tendency to pursue military rather than diplomatic solutions, its failure to consider or consult with allies on foreign policies of mutual concern, and its perceived capture by special interest groups, especially religious groups and multinational corporations. To Andrew Kohut (2007:2), president of the Pew Research Center, animosity toward the United States “is worldwide. This is not just a rift with our European allies or hatred of America in the Middle East. It is a global slide, and positive views of the United States have declined in other regions of the world, particularly in Latin America and Asia.” The war in Iraq is widely considered by foreign citizens to make them feel less rather than more safe. By the end of 2006, citizens in 33 of 35 countries surveyed believed the US war against Iraq had increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks around the world (World Public Opinion 2006). Citizens in countries with large numbers of Muslims reported being especially anxious. In Indonesia, 80% of survey respondents worried about a US threat to their government; the figure stood at 71% in Pakistan, 65% in Turkey, 67% in Jordan, and 59% in Lebanon (Kohut, 2007:2). The rise of anti-Americanism, also evident in public demonstrations and media coverage, is not lost on US citizens. A survey by Public Agenda (2005) found three-quarters of Americans afraid that “there may be growing hatred of the United States in Muslim countries,” and that the United States “may be losing the trust and friendship of people in other countries.” More than 60% believed the accusation was at least partly justified that the United States had been “too quick to resort to war” against Iraq. Nearly 90% believed that “showing more respect for the views and needs of other countries would enhance security.” The roots of global animus toward the United States are the subject of Joan Hoff's A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush. The reference is to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's fictional character, who makes a “pact with the devil” in return for a more enjoyable life. Hoff, a historian, identifies a gap between the US government's exceptionalist pretensions and its foreign-policy behavior. Hoff sees this gap as so persistent over time that it represents a core element of US foreign policy. The notion that US leaders have routinely aligned themselves with unsavory world leaders in order to advance the nation's global self-interests is hardly new. Indeed, this is a central premise of the revisionist school of US diplomatic history that was first popularized by William Appleman Williams (1959). Others in the Wisconsin school, including Walter LaFeber (1963), Gabriel Kolko (1969), Lloyd Gardner (1970), and Thomas J. McCormick (1989), attributed this gap to pervasive economic motivations that were shrouded from public view in the foreign-policy process. Hoff grounds her study in the founding “myths” of the United States, which themselves were shaped by the presumptions of early settlers to have found, in North America, a “city on the hill” or a “new Jerusalem.” Echoes from this cultural self-image could be found in George Washington's farewell address, the Monroe Doctrine, calls for Manifest Destiny, and other vestiges of the nineteenth century. To Hoff, Woodrow Wilson personified the exceptionalist strain in US foreign policy early in the twentieth century while also contradicting his own stated principles by intervening militarily in Central America and the Caribbean on several occasions to shore up repressive US regional allies. The author's rendering of the period from Wilson's presidency to the end of the Cold War does not depart fundamentally from those written by other revisionists. Among their common assertions during the Cold War: The United States resembled “traditional” great powers by steadily extending its hegemonic reach through a variety of means, including economic integration and military intimidation. American leaders exaggerated the threat posed by the Soviet Union in order to consolidate its Western alliance and to convince private citizens that a permanent military buildup and global presence were necessary. Few obstacles stood in the way of US expansion, but when they did, the government pursued its goals without regard to democratic principles, international law, or other normative constraints. Military coups backed by the CIA in Iran (1953), the Dominican Republic (1961), and Chile (1973) epitomized this resort to realpolitik, or “power politics.” More often than not, US misdeeds did not enhance the nation's security but instead produced “blowback” in such places as Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The end of the Cold War was due to the implosion of the Soviet Union, not to the superior power, let alone moral character, of the United States. Indeed, the containment doctrine that guided US foreign policy for nearly half a century merely prolonged and wrongfully globalized the Cold War. In this respect, the main body of Hoff's book amounts to kicking a lot of dead horses. Hoff is on more original grounds, however, when she confronts US foreign-policy behavior after the Cold War. She is skeptical of US motivations in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which she attributes to the need to secure oil supplies. She is also wary of Bill Clinton's national security strategy of “engagement and enlargement,” primarily because his administration did little to enhance the long-term prospects for democratic development in most countries. And she criticizes Clinton for intervening in Haiti but not Rwanda, for using force indiscriminately in Kosovo, for launching a missile-defense system, and for doing little to curb the growing threat posed by Islamic terrorism. The vitriolic tone of this section pales in comparison to that directed toward George W. Bush. His doctrine of US primacy and preemptive war, Hoff argues, is most noteworthy for its “blatant arrogance and self-righteous indifference to international law cloaked in evangelical religiosity….(The Bush Doctrine) is new only to the degree that it symbolizes a pathological imbalance between the presumed universality of American ideals and the country's actual national security interests that dwarfs previous such periodic imbalances that took place during the Cold War” (pp. 169, 170). She is unsparing in her criticism of Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks, particularly the invasion of Iraq, which included deals with “devils” in many governments that aligned themselves with the global war on terror. For students of US foreign policy who have yet to sample the revisionist diplomatic history, Hoff's book provides a concise, yet comprehensive and well-annotated overview. She makes reference to political scientists such as Robert Gilpin, Hugh Heclo, and Stephen Krasner along with dozens of historians and a variety of popular authors, including Bob Woodward and Fareed Zakaria, all of whom inform her critique of US foreign policy during this period. While her analysis is incessantly critical, she aptly summarizes the actions by the United States that have left it marginalized in the international community today. At the domestic level, her concerns about the steady growth of presidential power throughout the past century are well founded as it poses additional barriers to the ability of the United States to gain a global stature that is, in any positive way, “exceptional.” No region has recorded a greater erosion of support for US foreign policy than Europe, where the US march to war in Iraq ruptured relations with NATO members France and Germany and the UN. Even before the Iraq war, a cross-national survey (Kennedy and Bouton 2002) uncovered deep differences between American and European public opinion over the magnitude of global threats, the benefits of US leadership, the merits of higher defense spending, and Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The Iraq war then triggered a free fall in US popularity. Between 2002 and 2006, the US favorability rating fell from 63% to 39% in France, from 61% to 37% in Germany, from 75% to 46% in Great Britain, from 30% to 12% in Turkey, and from 61% to 43% in Russia. This ill will toward Bush extended from Europe's general public to its political elites. Ninety-eight percent of European Commission members and 68% of members in the European Parliament disapproved of the president's foreign policies in 2006 (Center for the Study of Political Change 2006:6). In these and other surveys, actions by the United States prompted Europeans to favor strengthening their own defense forces and become more independent of Washington in foreign affairs. This European discontent is the subject of Giovanna Dell'Orto's provocative book, The Hidden Hand of the American Dream. Her central argument is that the United States has long been admired by Europeans as an “imagined community” that is more “a concept than a country.” Specifically, the United States has been historically perceived in Europe as a “land of plenty of opportunity that beckons people of goodwill everywhere” (p. 7). But this exceptionalist view was ruptured on two occasions: during the Spanish American War and during the Bush administration's war on terror. In both cases, she finds, self-serving and aggressive US actions contradicted the government's moralistic rhetoric. As a result, many Europeans were forced to abandon their perception of the United States as a benign hegemon. The disillusion that resulted was short-lived in the first case, as the United States regained its lofty reputation during the world wars. It is too early to tell how long the latest crisis of European confidence will last. Dell'Orto uses discourse analysis in the tradition of Michel Foucault to support her findings. She seeks to identify the “underlying” discourse, apart from public statements and government actions, that revealed the strains in European public opinion toward the United States. From her view, ideas contributed more than material forces to this perception, a proposition that warrants her constructivist methodology. Her research includes the study of nearly 4,000 articles in elite British, French, German, and Italian newspapers during both crises. Her content analysis in the second case also includes resolutions and debates in the European Union between April 2001 and May 2005. This is an impressive body of discursive data, most of which are translated by the author. In the Spanish-American War, Dell'Orto finds that Europeans generally did not believe US assertions regarding its motivations in the conflict. Instead, they suspected that the war was driven by geopolitical factors, namely, to establish US spheres of influence in the Caribbean and western Pacific at a time when Great Britain, by now a close US ally, was preoccupied with maintaining its regional security in Europe amid the rise of Germany and the slow collapse of the continental balance of power. Her content analysis reveals a widely shared apprehension that the United States, “with territorial possessions, with imperial interests and responsibilities, despite all US assurances to the contrary and despite the implicit and diffused justification of colonialism, could no longer be the same nation” (p. 69). The same pattern was evident in the aftermath of 9/11, particularly during the Bush administration's march to war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Contrary to the virtuous rhetoric of the White House, its militaristic response to the attacks and unilateral actions undermined the trans-Atlantic solidarity that had endured since World War II. The Bush Doctrine, with its emphasis on sustained US primacy and preemptive war, further alarmed Europeans, not simply for their direct implications regarding US foreign policy, but for their more abstract sensibilities regarding the nature of American power. European leaders, she finds, “have begun to publicly repudiate the United States they see as bent on having its way, disregarding every effort for a real and ideal partnership that the European Union made” (pp. 116–117). This book should be of interest to cultural historians as well as those interested in cross-national and historical media studies. General observers of trans-Atlantic relations will also find the book worth reading. Those seeking a rigorous, carefully coded content analysis may find the narrative disappointing, however, as much of the cited discourse appears anecdotal and selectively chosen to advance the thesis. The study would be further strengthened with a more comprehensive review of the literature on American national character, as scholars such as Louis Hartz and Seymour Martin Lipset provided the intellectual basis for understanding American exceptionalism that is of central concern to this book. Her future speculation, that the latest crisis in trans-Atlantic relations may survive the Bush Doctrine, is also unsupported by empirical evidence. Still, her thorough research does open doors to the underlying discourse that shaped European public opinion in both periods, and for this reason the book deserves attention. Another factor that accounts for the current global unpopularity of the United States is the nation's use of the death penalty, as Alan W. Clarke and Laurelyn Whitt argue in their book, The Bitter Fruit of American Justice. Their empirical premise is straight forward: the United States in mid-2008 was one of 60 countries that permitted capital punishment; another 137 had outlawed the practice (Amnesty International 2008). Nearly 90% of known executions in 2007 took place in the United States and four other countries, each known for widespread abuses of human rights: China, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. As the authors point out, most democracies have long since abandoned the death penalty; the European Union today is a capital punishment-free zone. In these countries, the United Nations, and a wide variety of human rights NGOs, state executions are considered a fundamental human rights violation, regardless of the charge issued against the victim. The growing number of countries that take this view suggests that it has become a norm in global politics. In this sense, this book can be added to earlier works by Mueller (1989) and Finnemore (2003), and other scholars who have observed a steady, if incremental, change in state behavior in a variety of issue areas resulting from the emergence and spread of norms. In the context of such a “norm cascade,” the dwindling number of states that violate the norm may be shamed, if not coerced, into compliance. To Clarke and Whitt, such pressure is already observable in the United States, stemming from a combination of transnational and domestic sources. In the latter case, while a majority of the US population supports capital punishment for murder, this support has eroded in recent years. The authors argue that this trend is due to mounting evidence that capital punishment does not deter future acts of homicide, that executions disproportionately involve racial minorities and low-income citizens, and that the costs of capital punishment are much higher than widely believed. But the main problem, they believe, has to do with the large number of cases in which those given the death penalty are later found to be innocent. Several such cases are detailed in the book that lead the authors to conclude that, “since the American death penalty is resulting in the execution of significant numbers of innocent people, and that since any penalty that does this is morally unacceptable, the death penalty is morally unacceptable” (p. 135). This emerging domestic concern about the death penalty, however, may be less powerful than that imposed by the international community. The authors begin their analysis by considering the concept of sovereignty, which, they argue, has grown more conditional in recent years as a result of massive human rights violations in such places as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Most recently, the refusal of the government of Myanmar to distribute emergency aid to victims of a catastrophic cyclone in May 2008 raised questions about the “absolute” conception of internal sovereignty enshrined in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Two areas related to capital punishment make the United States vulnerable to foreign pressure, the authors argue. First, US courts face increasing opposition from foreign governments to extradite prisoners to the United States if it is possible that they will be executed upon conviction of the crimes alleged against them. This has particular relevance for the US war on terror, as dozens of suspected terrorists have been sought for extradition and subsequent prosecution, with execution as a possible sentence. Second, the authors argue that the United States, a party to the 1970 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, has frequently prevented foreign-born prisoners from gaining the access to their government representatives in a manner that is mandated by the convention. Such instances are described in cases involving American-held prisoners from Paraguay, Germany, and Mexico. In the German case, two men were executed in 1999 before their government had an opportunity to intervene. Once again, US self-interests may be at stake, as the United States routinely assures its own citizens that they will be aided by State Department officials in the event they are arrested overseas. Such assurances may be unwarranted, Clarke and Whitt claim, if foreign governments retaliate against the United States. There is some evidence that the US officials are yielding on this issue, which supports the authors' assertion that international pressure may ultimately nudge the United States away from the death penalty. This book is clearly written, well organized, and thoroughly documented. The authors refer to a variety of court opinions, legal journals, and reports from human rights NGOs that support their claims regarding the growing domestic and transnational pressure against the death penalty in the United States. Their argument, therefore, should be of interest to scholars of American politics and international relations. Along with the other two books reviewed above, this study enhances our understanding of the diminished stature of the United States, and how long the odds are that this stature can recover anytime soon. References Amnesty International . ( 2008 ) Death Penalty . Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty (Accessed September 11, 2008). Google Scholar Center for the Study of Political Change . ( 2006 ) European Elites Survey: Key Findings of Members of the European Parliament and Top European Commission Officials . Available at: http://www.gips.unisi.it/circap/ees_overview. Google Scholar Finnemore Martha . ( 2003 ) The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force . Ithaca : Cornell University Press . Gardner Lloyd . ( 1970 ) Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy . Chicago : Quadrangle Books . Kennedy Craig Bouton Marshall M. . ( 2002 ) The Real Trans-Atlantic Gap . Foreign Policy 133 (November–December): 66 – 74 . Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS Kohut Andrew . ( 2007 ) America's Image to the World: Findings from the Pew Global Attitude Project . Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight; Committee on Foreign Affairs, March 14. Kolko Gabriel . ( 1969 ) The Roots of American Foreign Policy . Boston : Beacon Press . LaFeber Walter . ( 1963 ) The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 . Ithaca : Cornell University Press . McCormick Thomas J. . ( 1989 ) America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press . Mueller John . ( 1989 ) Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War . New York : Basic Books . Public Agenda . ( 2005 ) Americans Perplexed and Anxious About Relations with Muslim World , August 3. http://www.publicagenda.org/press-releases/americans-preplexed-and-anxious-about-relations-muslim-world (accessed September 11, 2008). Google Scholar Williams William Appleman . ( 1959 ) The Tragedy of American Diplomacy . Cleveland : World Publishing . World Public Opinion . ( 2006 ) World Public Says Iraq War has Increased Global Terrorist Threat , December 1. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security-bt/172.php?nid=&id=&pnt=172 (accessed September 11, 2008). Google Scholar © 2008 International Studies Association
TI - Falling Out: The United States in the Global Community
JF - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2008.00832.x
DA - 2008-11-18
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/falling-out-the-united-states-in-the-global-community-CXQEFa8NSi
SP - 1
EP - 781
VL - Advance Article
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -