Going It Alone

We should take heed when much of the world says it distrusts us.

During the war on Iraq I heard a caller on a Christian radio station suggest, “Why don’t we just raze the United Nations buildings in New York and rebuild the World Trade Center on that site!” The host enthusiastically agreed. For the next hour, callers piled on scorn for France, Germany, and other nations that had “wimpy” objections to the war, while dismissing all Arab concerns out of hand. The United States, they seemed to imply, has the right, even the obligation, to go it alone in bringing order to the world.

Because I frequently travel overseas, I am struck by the difference in how Americans perceive themselves and how those of other nations see us. We think of ourselves as generous, compassionate, good-natured, slow to anger, and committed to justice. Some overseas see us as arrogant, selfish, decadent, and uncaring. They judge American values by our rap music and television shows, most of which glorify sex, wealth, and violence. They know that the U.S. military possesses more weapons of mass destruction than all other armies combined. And they note that the world’s wealthiest nation contributes only half as much foreign aid as Europe.

The outpouring of sympathy after September 11 demonstrated that the U.S., for all its faults, could still draw on a large reservoir of goodwill. WE ARE ALL AMERICANS NOW, proclaimed one headline. The fact that the newspaper was the largest in France shows how much of that goodwill has since dissipated.

I heard the former Ambassador to the U.S. from Pakistan, a devoted friend of America, put it this way: “In the days of the Cold War, there were two giants on the world stage—a brutal giant and a gentle giant. Now there is only one giant, and we fear it is becoming brutal.” Even our closest allies see the U.S. as a loner nation that pulls out of treaties that don’t serve our interests. We backed out of the Kyoto Accords, the Law of the Sea, and the International Criminal Court, as well as treaties controlling land mines and chemical weapons.

The callers on the talk show recounted some of those reversals with pride. “Who needs the rest of the world?” asked one. But as the war in Iraq made clear, we need the rest of the world. When television broadcast the Iraqis’ abuse of our POWs, we appealed to the Geneva Convention. When rumors spread about illicit weapons, we threatened an international war crimes tribunal. As bills for reconstruction mounted, we turned to other nations for help.

I hope and pray that the war in Iraq, with its enormous toll in both human suffering and economic costs, leads to stability in the region and reduced terrorism globally. I fear just the opposite, that sowing the wind may reap the whirlwind. As Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak warned, the war could inflame Arabs and produce 100 bin Ladens.

A friend of mine traveling in Malaysia brought back a newspaper report of a speech by the prime minister there. Right now, we cannot stop the U.S. from doing whatever it wants, admitted Malaysia’s leader. Our only hope is to produce our own weapons, our own “Islamic bomb.”

My concerns come in part from discussions with the one group of conservative Christians most nervous about anti-Americanism: missionaries. They bear the brunt of world opinion, and sometimes pay for it with their lives. One wrote, “Arabs are interpreting war against Iraq as Christian aggression against an Islamic nation. This false perception is so deeply ingrained among most Arabs that it undermines any perception of Christianity as a message of love and peace.”

As the world’s only superpower, the United States bears grave responsibilities of leadership. Sometimes we must use force, and sometimes restraint. Sometimes we must act against world opinion. Popular psychiatrist M. Scott Peck makes an intriguing observation:

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