Published in The Register-Guard, June 2, 2008
It used to be the conventional wisdom that Americans learn world geography only when the country is at war. But apparently even being at war does not catalyze the need to understand the world and, more importantly, our own place in it.
Recently, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited India on a quick trip that also included stops in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. India has a growing need for energy and, with very little petroleum and natural gas within its borders, it actively seeks to import them from other countries — including Iran.
The U.S. government, which is on a mission to isolate Iran as much as possible, attempted to pressure India on the eve of this visit. Our government views any trade with Iran as supporting the regime there and, thus, opposed a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and India. The State Department further advised India to press Ahmadinejad to end Iran’s nuclear program.
To which the Indian government’s spokesman responded: “India and Iran are ancient civilizations whose relations span centuries. Neither country needs any guidance on the future conduct of bilateral relations.”
That is a quite a rebuke to the world’s lone superpower, which is often quite alone, too, in many ways. But it was not the first time and is increasingly becoming the trend. It is more and more difficult to get other countries to “our” side, while it is getting easier for countries to pooh-pooh the United States.
In a stinging essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, writes: “The West is understandably reluctant to accept that the era of its domination is ending and that the Asian century has come.”
Ouch! Even though Mahbubani refers to the West, most of the essay targets only the United States.
Mahbubani then kicks it up a notch when he writes: “The West is not welcoming Asia’s progress. ... Unfortunately, the West has gone from being the world’s primary problem solver to being its single biggest liability.” Bam!
Even Rodney Dangerfield gets more respect than the United States, when our status is such that we are being explicitly blamed as being the world’s single biggest liability!
Despite all this, I am not sure whether we in the United States are truly making any attempt to understand the world that is changing at a rapid clip. Even when we pause to note an event, we seem to be constrained by calculations, explicit or implicit, of “what’s in it for us?”
Remember the brouhaha when it seemed as if every presidential candidate, when there were many, was issuing calls for Pervez Musharraf to quit the Pakistani presidency? I suppose it was politically convenient then, and once that yielded the desired benefits, we were off to other pressing matters.
Well, Musharraf continues on as the president. Of course, the parties that opposed him have formed the government. But, ironically, it is this “opposition” to Musharraf that is seriously exploring releasing nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan from house arrest. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has publicly admitted to selling atomic secrets to such countries as Iran and North Korea. The same Iran that we want to excommunicate from the world. And the same North Korea that has become a master at negotiating on its own terms.
And, unfortunately, all America can do is watch events unfold.
Even more recently, just a couple of days ago, when the United States declassified intelligence information about Syria’s nuclear program, the collective response from most of the world was à la Rhett Butler’s, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” More ouch!
As we scramble to understand one global issue after another, we notice that the United States has not been able to play a constructive role in any of the recent crises — from Zimbabwe to Kenya, from Myanmar to Tibet.
At this rate, a Miss America contestant’s wishes for world peace might be the only way that the United States can fit in with the rest of the world!
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