Challenging Americans' Insular View of the World

Challenging Americans' Insular View of the World

by William Pfaff
Tribune Media Services
May 11, 2005

A year ago, this writer received an email from a young American who was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford.

He had liked my newspaper columns and wrote to me because he thought I might have some advice for American students overseas, like himself, who were concerned about the serious disagreements in the United States over the Iraq war, and were upset that the views they had formed of US foreign policy — after living and studying abroad — conflicted with the ideas of their families and friends at home.

I don't recall that I had anything very useful to say, other than to tell him that most of the Americans I knew who worked and lived abroad — Republicans or Democrats — had the same problem.

They saw a great lack of realism in what homebound Americans said, and did, about the world abroad.

When these overseas Americans went home, they discovered inadequate or biased reporting on television and in most of the newspapers, as compared to what they were used to in the foreign media. They thought US ignorance of the rest of the world was worrisome.

They also met hostility when they suggested to friends or family that while what happened in New York and Washington on 911 was big in scale and drama, other countries had terrorism problems, too, or were still experiencing them (as in Spain, with Basque nationalist terrorists). They asked why Americans were so frightened.

This young man, Seth Green, had set up a movement called "Bringing the World Home" to inspire other American students overseas to try what he called "reverse public diplomacy" when they returned to the US.

This was an effort "to use the knowledge and passion of young Americans who have been abroad to raise awareness in the US about the rest of the world and its opinions".

The effort has been a remarkable success and found university and foundation sponsorship. Late last year — following the US elections — it sponsored a new program to try to heal divisions at home "by raising awareness about the hidden consensus that already exists in a number of key foreign policy areas".

This "Red, White and Blue Coming Together" movement was led by a bipartisan coalition of people in Congress, retired diplomats, academics and journalists, who spoke to "Town Meetings" across the country.

Such questions as "What is driving anti-Americanism?" and "Clash of civilizations or common ground?" were debated, as well as US-African relations, US-UN relations and the 911 Commission recommendations.

Now called Americans for Informed Democracy, the movement sponsored a number of conferences and workshops abroad on "How you can get involved".

I was invited to London to speak to one of the very impressive groups of young Americans that Seth Green and his friends have assembled.

One reason the crisis has looked so different at home and abroad is that the terrorists attacked the American sense of moral identity, as a better country than others, with higher values. Hence, the attackers seemed incomprehensibly perverse or evil.

It looked otherwise abroad, where people don't share the idea that Americans are better than others.

The Europeans viewed the 911 attacks in the light of their own experience of terrorism (and of wartime attacks on cities) and could put them in historical and cultural context.

The fact that the mass of ordinary Europeans rejected the Iraq invasion distressed many American students abroad, but also made them ask why the Europeans who, until then, had liked and admired the US, should suddenly turn against it.

They knew that some of the ideas put around in the US — that European elites "hated America" or were afraid of their own Muslim populations — were simply silly.

They had to look for better explanations and, whatever they found, it was not what their friends and relatives were hearing from Washington or from the neo-conservatives, or even from a mainstream American media that often went along with the Bush administration out of misguided patriotism, shared illusions or fear of getting out of line with popular opinion.

These young Americans abroad were willing to listen to other ideas and could criticise the US without the bitterness or sense of betrayal some older expatriates felt about how the attacks had changed America.

The young people criticized the US with their optimism intact — a reassuringly American reaction.