to gain by being as close to America as was Tony Blair.
Meanwhile, Eastern and Central Europe have become distinctly more sour, feeling that their support has been taken for granted ever since they extended a huge wave of enthusiasm toward the United States when the Iron Curtain fell. The Polish government said in January 2008 that it did not regard the United States’ hope of siting ten missiles for its new “missile shield” in Poland as a “done deal,” and that the decision would be made “entirely on Polish national interests,” 26 although it has since been more encouraging.
It isn’t just Europe that is behaving this way. Latin America, in a populist mood, has found new inspiration for its traditional America bashing. Venezuela is threatening to withhold oil supplies, while Brazil is blocking the United States’ moves in world trade talks and questioning its attempt to curb nuclear proliferation.
This is the puzzle facing the United States: It stands for Western values and Western democracy; its constitution sets out those principles in language of unmatched power and simplicity; it has gone to great lengths to defend them. Yet, at a time when its allies have the luxury of questioning their relationship with America, they wonder whether they share its values at all. That is what I explore in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
AMERICAN VALUES ARE WESTERN VALUES
Now It Gets Fun!” —that was the headline of the Drudge Report on January 9, 2008, the morning after the New Hampshire primaries, over a picture of the victorious (and startled) Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Drudge was right. The surprise, the adrenaline, the emphatic and unexpected endorsement of the voters —that is the exuberant pleasure of American democracy.
It is not matched anywhere else. India is the only other country attempting something like the American project, of uniting many very different kinds of people within a democracy. Its elections are the world’s most dramatic —a population nearly four times that of the United States, crowded in an area just a third the size, rushing to get to the voting booths. But for all the astounding virtues of Indian democracy —not least that it survives, despite constant predictions of its death —it has not been good at delivering the rights and protections of its own irreproachably idealistic constitution to its poorest people and its minorities.
Nor do American elections have the furtive whimsicality of those in Britain, called at the prime minister’s discretion when he believes the wind is blowing in his favor (as long as it is within five years of the last polls). Instead, the immovable schedule of the election of the U.S. president, the Congress, the state governors, and the half million other elected officials 1 in America is the rhythmic beat by which the rest of the world sets its political clock.
The American enterprise can appear anachronistic at a time when countries are shedding fractious provinces or breaking into pieces entirely. But it still represents a profoundly civilized goal: to overcome ethnic and religious differences in uniting people willingly into one country.
These democratic principles, together with the individual rights and liberties set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are America’s proudest possession. They represent the values in which the West says it believes, and which the United States has defended in two world wars. They are worth defending: they are the democratic ideal.
But they are also much rarer than America has recognized, and much more foreign to other countries than the United States has appreciated when it has tried to export those principles around the world. This chapter looks at the difficult journey by which the United States arrived at its own system of government, and why its values and constitution can seem so alien, not just in the Arab world and other noisy centers of resentment of America but in
Meanwhile, Eastern and Central Europe have become distinctly more sour, feeling that their support has been taken for granted ever since they extended a huge wave of enthusiasm toward the United States when the Iron Curtain fell. The Polish government said in January 2008 that it did not regard the United States’ hope of siting ten missiles for its new “missile shield” in Poland as a “done deal,” and that the decision would be made “entirely on Polish national interests,” 26 although it has since been more encouraging.
It isn’t just Europe that is behaving this way. Latin America, in a populist mood, has found new inspiration for its traditional America bashing. Venezuela is threatening to withhold oil supplies, while Brazil is blocking the United States’ moves in world trade talks and questioning its attempt to curb nuclear proliferation.
This is the puzzle facing the United States: It stands for Western values and Western democracy; its constitution sets out those principles in language of unmatched power and simplicity; it has gone to great lengths to defend them. Yet, at a time when its allies have the luxury of questioning their relationship with America, they wonder whether they share its values at all. That is what I explore in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
AMERICAN VALUES ARE WESTERN VALUES
Now It Gets Fun!” —that was the headline of the Drudge Report on January 9, 2008, the morning after the New Hampshire primaries, over a picture of the victorious (and startled) Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Drudge was right. The surprise, the adrenaline, the emphatic and unexpected endorsement of the voters —that is the exuberant pleasure of American democracy.
It is not matched anywhere else. India is the only other country attempting something like the American project, of uniting many very different kinds of people within a democracy. Its elections are the world’s most dramatic —a population nearly four times that of the United States, crowded in an area just a third the size, rushing to get to the voting booths. But for all the astounding virtues of Indian democracy —not least that it survives, despite constant predictions of its death —it has not been good at delivering the rights and protections of its own irreproachably idealistic constitution to its poorest people and its minorities.
Nor do American elections have the furtive whimsicality of those in Britain, called at the prime minister’s discretion when he believes the wind is blowing in his favor (as long as it is within five years of the last polls). Instead, the immovable schedule of the election of the U.S. president, the Congress, the state governors, and the half million other elected officials 1 in America is the rhythmic beat by which the rest of the world sets its political clock.
The American enterprise can appear anachronistic at a time when countries are shedding fractious provinces or breaking into pieces entirely. But it still represents a profoundly civilized goal: to overcome ethnic and religious differences in uniting people willingly into one country.
These democratic principles, together with the individual rights and liberties set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are America’s proudest possession. They represent the values in which the West says it believes, and which the United States has defended in two world wars. They are worth defending: they are the democratic ideal.
But they are also much rarer than America has recognized, and much more foreign to other countries than the United States has appreciated when it has tried to export those principles around the world. This chapter looks at the difficult journey by which the United States arrived at its own system of government, and why its values and constitution can seem so alien, not just in the Arab world and other noisy centers of resentment of America but in
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