For comments with the general thrust of “it’s not that simple,” I should like to thank Mariot Leslie, Lieutenant-General Jonathon Riley, Daniel Bethlehem, and Antony Blinken; for undiluted exposition of their views, Tom Burke, on the environment, Colonel Dwight Sullivan, on the Guantánamo military commissions, and John Bolton, on Iran. I am enormously grateful, too, to the help from fellow journalists and from academics, particularly Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Michael Goldfarb, Stephanie Koury, Dan Plesch, and Charles Ferguson.
I am grateful above all to my parents not just for provoking this —I can’t say inspiring it, because they may well disagree with the text — but also for looking after my daughter when deadlines loomed (and I wouldn’t want to miss a chance to thank the BBC’s exceptionally intelligent CBeebies Channel for young children). On that note, I have to thank Laura for putting up with the enterprise with more patience than a five-year-old need do, and also for her interested and quizzical first reactions to the United States. After inspecting Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, she wondered why so many dinosaurs had lived in New York; during the 2008 primaries, she suddenly declared (with no parental guidance, I must say), “I want the girl to win.” I couldn’t face telling her that, of all the ways in which America confounds its admirers and critics abroad, its regularly startling choice of presidents tops the list.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Why America Needs a Defense
1.Antony Blinken, discussion with Bronwen Maddox, November 2006. (back to text)
2.Said during an interview with Bronwen Maddox for The Times, May 5, 1998. (back to text)
3.Matthew Parris, “Yes, America’s My Friend. Or Is It? Suddenly I’m Not Sure,” The Times, January 13, 2007. (back to text)
4.David Miliband, discussions and speeches on democracy, early 2008. (back to text)
Chapter 2: Unloved, or Simply Loathed
1.For example, among Lewis’s many books on the theme, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). (back to text)
2.Marina Warner, New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1997. (back to text)
3.Josef Joffe, “America the Inescapable,” New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1997. (back to text)
4.Nicolas Sarkozy, speech at the invitation of the French-American Foundation, Washington, DC, April 18, 2007, http://www.ambafrance-us.org/news/ (under “France/U.S. Relations”). (back to text)
5.Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center, June 2007, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=256. (back to text)
6.Ibid. (back to text)
7.Ibid. (back to text)
8.Transatlantic Trends 2007, http://www.transatlantictrends.org. (back to text)
9.Margaret Drabble, “I Loathe America, and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World,” Daily Telegraph, May 8, 2003. (back to text)
10.Justin Webb, quoted in “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the Twenty-first Century,” report by the BBC Trust, June 2007. (back to text)
11.BBC online debate on anti-Americanism, April 16, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4881474.stm. (back to text)
12.Michael Werz and Barbara Fried, “Modernity, Resentment, and Anti-Americanism,” in Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). (back to text)
13.Tony Blair, interview with Robert Thomson and Bronwen Maddox, The Times, May 21, 2002. (back to text)
14.Peter Beinart, New Republic, July 2, 2001. (back to text)
15.Peter Schneider, New York Times Magazine, June 8, 1997. (back to text)
16.Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism After 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). (back to text)
17.George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” 1944. (back to text)
18.Hugh Wilford, “Britain: In Between,” in The Americanization of Europe, 25. (back to text)
19.Walter Mead, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003. (back to text)
20.Quoted in Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 52. (back to text)
21.David Martinon, quoted in the New York Times, October 28, 2007. (back to text)
22.Le Figaro, August 28, 2007. (back to text)
23.Bernard Kouchner, interview with Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, March 12, 2008. (back to text)
24.New York Times, October 28, 2007. (back to text)
25.Richard Haass, Financial Times, December 19, 2007. (back to text)
26.Comments by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in January 2008, including Sikorski, January 5, to the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza: “This is an American, not a Polish project.” (back to text)
Chapter 3: American Values Are Western Values
1.U.S. Census Bureau, 1992, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/cb95-18.txt. (back to text)
2.Jonathan Freedland, Bring Home the Revolution (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 19. (back to text)
3.David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). (back to text)
4.Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). (back to text)
5.U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census, CIA World Factbook. (back to text)
6.Michael Werz and Barbara Fried, “Modernity, Resentment, and Anti-Americanism,” in Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). (back to text)
7.Jack Straw, said to Bronwen Maddox on Straw’s chartered flight. (back to text)
8.Office of Immigration Statistics, 2006 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, “Persons Obtaining Legal Permanent Resident Status by Region and Selected Country of Last Residence, Fiscal Years 1820 to 2006.” (back to text)
9.Giles Whittell, The Times, July 7, 2007. (back to text)
10.Pew Research Center, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” February 25, 2008, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/743/-united-states-religion. (back to text)
11.George Weigel, February 22, 2006. (back to text)
12.The legislative program of parliament is set by the government, and if the government’s party has a majority in the Commons, its bills will pass. The House of Lords, the other chamber of parliament, has not been able to veto legislation since the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949; it can only revise and stall it. No monarch asked to give royal assent has threatened to withhold it since Queen Anne in 1708. (back to text)
13.Said in conversation with Bronwen Maddox. (back to text)
14.Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, January 14, 2008. (back to text)
15.Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, interview with Bronwen Maddox, The Times, May 27, 2005. (back to text)
16.Said in conversation with Bronwen Maddox. (back to text)
17.Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). (back to text)
Chapter 4: For Richer, For Poorer
1.George Soros, “The Worst Market Crisis in Sixty Years,” Financial Times, January 23, 2008. (back to text)
2.The Coca-Cola Company, Annual Report 2006, Form 10K. (back to text)
3.Fortune, July 23, 2007. (back to text)
4.Gunnar Öquist, October 4, 2006, when America won all the science Nobel Prizes that week. (back to text)
5.Stefan Theil, Foreign Policy, January/February 2008. (back to text)
6.The Economist, January 31, 2008. (back to text)
7.Said at a conference of the Social Democratic Party, of which Müntefering was chairman, April 13, 2005. (back to text)
8.Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). (back to text)
9.Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). (back to text)
10.Peter Mandelson, Alcuin Lectur
e, Cambridge University, February 8, 2008. (back to text)
11.The Coca-Cola Company, Annual Report 2006. (back to text)
12.Michael Werz and Barbara Fried, “Modernity, Resentment, and Anti-Americanism,” in Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). (back to text)
13.Quoted in Newsweek, September 10, 2007. (back to text)
14.Ibid. (back to text)
15.Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Were American: U.S. Mass Media in Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). (back to text)
16.Quoted in Financial Times, February 20, 2008. (back to text)
Chapter 5: The Pursuit of Democracy
1.John Quincy Adams, speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, July 4, 1821. (back to text)
2.Albert J. Beveridge, speech, “In Support of an American Empire,” 56th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record, 704–12. (back to text)
3.George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). (back to text)
4.Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1899. (back to text)
5.Thomas Donnelly, Empire of Liberty: The Historical Underpinnings of the Bush Doctrine (Washington, DC: AEI, June 2005). (back to text)
6.George W. Bush, Overview of America’s National Security Strategy, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/sectionI.html. (back to text)
7.Niall Ferguson, Financial Times, January 26–27, 2008. (back to text)
8.If there is space for one more, then the prize, in my view, should go to Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder, an investigation into the 1998 assassination of a Guatemalan bishop who had helped lay the blame mainly on the country’s military governments for the murders of an estimated 200,000 civilians. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder (London: Atlantic Books, 2008). (back to text)
Chapter 6: Arrogant But Not Lawless
1.Said in conversation with Bronwen Maddox, March 2008. (back to text)
2.Robin Givhan, the Washington Post’s inimitable style writer, April 15, 2005. (back to text)
3.John Bolton, in a speech to a 1994 Global Structures Convocation hosted by the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions). (back to text)
4.The forty-nine countries named by the White House as the “coalition of the willing” were Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Macedonia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palau, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Tonga, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, and Uzbekistan. Of these, the following countries had an active or participant role, by providing either significant troops or political support: Australia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States. (back to text)
5.Interviews with U.S. officials, Bronwen Maddox, February 2007. (back to text)
6.Glenn Prickett, quoted by Thomas Friedman, International Herald Tribune, September 27, 2007. (back to text)
Chapter 7: The Iraq Invasion: Stupid But Not Malign
1.The case that Iraq failed most of the tests of a just war is made powerfully in Just War by Sir Michael Quinlan, the former permanent under-secretary (or most senior nonpolitical civil servant) of Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, the former chief of the defense staff and commander of NATO’s Northern Army Group. Just War (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). (back to text)
2.That case —for an early handover of sovereignty —is made by Jonathan Steele, the distinguished Guardian correspondent, in Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008). (back to text)
3.In his book Bad Days in Basra (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). (back to text)
4.Barbara Bodine, quoted in No End in Sight, documentary, directed by Charles Ferguson of the Council on Foreign Relations, Red Envelope Entertainment, 2007. (back to text)
Chapter 8: The Indefensible: Guantánamo and Torture
1.February 13, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk. (back to text)
2.As of March 2008, according to the Department of Defense: Ibrahim Ahmed, Mahmoud Al Qosi, Ghassan Abdullah Al Sharbi, Mohammed Ahmed Binyam, Omar Ahmed Khadr, David Matthew Hicks, Abdul Zahir, Sufyian Barhoumi, Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan, Jabran Said Wazar Al Qahtani, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, Mohammed al-Qahtani, Ahmad Al Darbi, Ali Hamza Al Bahlul, and Mohammed Jawad. (back to text)
3.Donald Rumsfeld, said to reporters when touring Guantánamo base, January 28, 2002; George W. Bush, separate from Rumsfeld, January 28, 2002. (back to text)
4.Colonel Morris Davis, quoted in the Bradenton Herald, February 28, 2006. “Remember if you dragged Dracula out into the sunlight he melted? Well, that’s kind of the way it is trying to drag a detainee into the courtroom.” (back to text)
5.Colonel Morris Davis, in interviews in February 2008, including remarks published in the New York Times, February 28, 2008. (back to text)
6.Decided June 29, 2006, http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions. (back to text)
7.Confirmed dead, reported dead, or reported missing, compiled by the Associated Press, http://www.september11victims.com. (back to text)
8.CIA head Michael Hayden, February 5, 2008, accompanying National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell in his annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “We used it against these three detainees [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri] because of the circumstances at the time. There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about Al Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed.” (back to text)
9.Washington Post, February 12, 2008. (back to text)
10.President Bush’s message to the House of Representatives, in vetoing the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. (back to text)
11.Richard Armitage to Charlie Rose, The Charlie Rose Show, November 7, 2007, a sentiment he has also expressed widely in writing. (back to text)
12.Lord Goldsmith, attorney general, speaking at a conference on international terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute in London, May 10, 2006. (back to text)
13.The Times online (http://www.timesonline.co.uk), in response to Bronwen Maddox article on Guantánamo of February 13, 2008. (back to text)
14.The Economist, September 22, 2007. (back to text)
Chapter 9: Be Careful What You Wish For
1.Measured by purchasing power parity, a way of translating one currency into another while allowing for goods being much cheaper in one country —in this case, China —than in the other. (back to text)
2.January 10, 2008, Beijing. (back to text)
3.Ibid. (back to text)
4.Shaukat Aziz, interview with Bronwen Maddox for The Times. (back to text)
5.United Nations Development Program, 1999. (back to text)
6.President Putin, interview with Bronwen Maddox for The Times, June 2007. (back to text)
7.President Putin announced Russia’s intention to suspend participation in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty on July 14, 2007. (back to text)
8.Dinner address, January 14, 2007, Beijing, Global Development Network (an international group of think tanks). (back to text)
9.Pan Yue, a deputy minister at the government’s environmental watchdog, quoted by The Economist, March 15, 2008. (back to text)
10.John Ikenberry, “The Rise of
China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008. (back to text)
11.CIA World Factbook. (back to text)
12.Ibid. (back to text)
13.Newsweek, October 6, 2007. (back to text)
14.President Ahmadinejad’s blog: http://www.ahmadinejad.ir. (back to text)
15.Israeli army officer, in conversation with Bronwen Maddox, 2007. (back to text)
16.Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, to Bronwen Maddox, November 2005. (back to text)
17.Michael Lind, “America Still Works,” Prospect, February 2008. (back to text)
Chapter 10: How America Could Help Itself
1.In response to a piece by Bronwen Maddox on the “arms race in space” on October 19, 2006. (back to text)
2.The Economist, June 20, 2007. (back to text)
3.Gary Samore and others, “Repairing the Damage: Possibilities and Limits of Transatlantic Consensus,” Adelphi Paper 389, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Routledge, UK, U.S., and Canada, August 2007. (back to text)
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