“He was sincere in his way,” Greene wrote of his American, Alden Pyle. “It was coincidence that the sacrifices were all paid by others.” Today, the image of the United States as oblivious, arrogant and maybe downright dangerous is reinforced every morning in European headlines. The cliched notion of Uncle Sam as a gun-toting loner and geopolitical cowboy, common during the Reagan years, is back with a vengeance.
The rhetoric has real-life consequences: The vote that excluded the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Commission last week is “an alarm that ought to make Washington think,” said the French daily Le Monde. The subsequent reaction of the U.S. Congress only worsens the ugly stereotype. The House–acting against the Bush administration–voted to withhold $244 million owed the United Nations as part of Washington’s already long-overdue back dues. “This will teach [these] countries a lesson,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos of California. “Actions have consequences. If they would like to get this payment, they will vote us back on the commission. If they don’t, it will cost them $244 million.”
More likely, the United States is going to find itself increasingly isolated, even in forums where it traditionally leads the consensus. Another secret U.N. ballot last week cost the United States its seat on the International Narcotics Control Board. “Does President Bush want to conduct his business with no thought of the U.N.?” asks columnist Pierre Rousselin of the conservative Paris daily Le Figaro. “The countries that refused to vote for the United States wanted to teach a lesson to the new master of America.”
Nor is the United Nations the only international organization where Washington faces mounting suspicion and resentment because of the Bush administration’s perceived unilateralism. As ministers from the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prepare to meet in Paris next week, senior staffers at the OECD are concerned that Washington’s approach to international trade focuses on bilateral and regional accords rather than pursuing global agreements that are more difficult to negotiate.
The same OECD staffers expressed amazement at Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s statement that Washington will no longer support the organization’s attempt to crack down on tax havens. “The United States does not support efforts to dictate to any country what its own tax rates or tax system should be and will not participate in any initiative to harmonize world tax systems,” O’Neill said in a statement. “The OECD never proposed any such thing,” said one of its senior officials.
For Europeans, a core complaint about America is its continued use of capital punishment. Even the (now delayed) execution of confessed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is unacceptable in many European eyes. As Le Monde pointed out Friday, McVeigh is “an authentic bad guy.” But Europeans have come to see the abolition of the death penalty as a measure of a country’s civilization and humanity; a standard that the United States generally, and former Texas Gov. Bush particularly, fails to meet.
In addition, Europeans have a list of perceived slights and insults so long it begins to sound like a litany. “There’s the anti-missile system that’s presented as take it or leave it,” says Le Figaro’s Rousselin, then “Washington’s unceremonious withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocols, which want to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses. The United States refuses to ratify the convention on the rights of the child, the one banning anti-personnel land mines, the nuclear test ban treaty and the even one that foresees an international criminal court.”
Those last rejections of widely supported U.N. initiatives date back to the Clinton administration, and there may be good reasons for the United States to withhold its support from any or all of these measures. But the impression is growing abroad that Washington is intent on imposing its own narrow, self-interested values on the world. If the trend continues, so will the disquiet about Americans.
