Everything Is International
Americans- including liberal, cosmopolitan Americans, discuss and debate issues as if we're the only country on Earth
Here are a couple of recent snapshots of public discussion in America:
Americans are debating whether or not mask and vaccine mandates are good or bad. Conservatives accuse liberals of trying to stomp on bedrock American values. Liberals argue that the Republican Party has been taken over by a cabal of anti-science conspiracy theorists who reflect what was once called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics”.
Americans spent the last few weeks discussion various things relating to the Olympic Games, from protests on the medal stand (Raven Saunders was the only one that really materialized) to trans and intersex athletes seeking to compete to the compromises that allowed Russia to send a team to Sha’Carri Richardson’s marijuana test.
What do these two things have in common? In both situations, the debate is occurring without any recognition of the rest of the world. In example (1), there is absolutely nothing unique about the American debates about vaccines and masks. There have been protests all over the world, and other countries are having the exact same debates. People don’t like restrictions and a subset of the population does not like to be told it has to take a vaccine. (News flash- they should. Everyone should. But that’s not the point of this piece.)
In other words, when conservatives say that there is a unique American value of freedom from wearing a mask, complying with a lockdown, or taking a vaccine, they are wrong- these feelings exist all over the world. And when liberals say this is all a product of the conspiratorialist movement that has taken over the Republican Party, no, it isn’t that either. Nor is it Donald Trump. It’s worldwide.
The same thing infects the Olympics discourse. The rules of the Olympics— those governing athlete protests as well as who participates— don’t exist to make Americans happy. They are carefully negotiated and are the result of diplomatic compromises that accommodate the views of the rest of the world. Specifically, your rule on protests on the medal stand has to deal with what might happen if athletes from Taiwan and China end up in the same victory ceremony. (This actually happened in the 2021 Olympics. Thankfully there was no protest by the Chinese athlete, though apparently Chinese television didn’t show the ceremony.) Your rules on trans athletes have to take into account the views of all the people in places that aren’t caught up in 21st Century western gender debates, as well as folks in places that are. Your rules on Russia have to take into account that Russia is a powerful country with a lot of allies, and you can’t just expel powerful countries from the Olympics without reprisals. Your rules on marijuana must take into account the views of people in places where pot is still illegal. Etc.
And yet Americans— in this case, mostly liberal, cosmopolitan Americans who watch a lot of the Olympics— discuss these issues as if the views of the rest of the world are completely irrelevant.
We do this all the time. Most obviously, we do this in foreign policy. How many times have you heard a foreign policy issue being discussed in terms of what WE are going to do, with no reference to any other actor? Right now, the Biden Administration is imposing additional sanctions on Cuba because of the suppression of pro-democracy protests down there. The reason why we are on an endless treadmill on Cuba policy is in part because we don’t really ever discuss the fact that nobody else on earth participates in our sanctions policy. In other words, the sanctions, for 60 years, have been completely ineffective at harming the Cuban government, because without any international support, Cuba can just trade with other countries instead.
This disease infects our discourse over Russia as well. There are people living in countries in Russia’s “near abroad” who don’t want anyone to make any sudden moves or provocations; they would bear the brunt of any war, not us. Similarly, some of the biggest advocates of detente with North Korea are located in South Korea, who would see hundreds of thousands of dead if a shooting war broke out near Seoul. But here in the US, we incessantly talk about how to “get tough” with Kim Jong Un with no reference to how any other countries may feel about this.
Decisions to pull troops out of places are especially infected with this discourse. If you believe the discourse of military hawks, the US has the only military in the world. If we pull out of Afghanistan, we are told, things will go to hell there. (They will, but it was already pretty hellish with us still there.) Why is that only our responsibility, though? Three other major militaries— the UK, Australia, and Canada— also invaded Afghanistan in 2002. But nobody talks about the British, Australia, or Canada “abandoning their allies” and “leaving people to the whims of the Taliban”. The only military in the world that matters is the US, apparently.
This goes back at least as far as Vietnam. Hawks gave the US all sorts of invective for leaving Vietnam, but the French left long before we did and somehow escaped criticism in America for pulling out.
Obviously, part of what is going on in these foreign policy examples is simply the rhetorical tactic of hawks to make every situation they want the US to intervene in the US’s responsibility. But that’s what makes my other examples so telling: why on earth would liberals adopt a rhetorical style associated with hawkish neoconservatives?
The reality is there have long been all sorts of indicators that American society is simply pretty arrogant about the rest of the world. We don’t know geography, we don’t know foreign languages, we don’t understand other cultures. Many liberals may feel they are above this, but they are affected by it too, even though it is an attitude associated with American conservativism.
And in an increasingly globalized world, in which China is emerging as the new hegemonic power, we have to stop thinking this way. We need to learn what the rest of the world thinks, and start taking it into account in both our discourse and our thought.