We want our desk back
The New York Times reports on a geopolitical image problem:
Favorable views of the United States dropped sharply over the past year in Spain, where only 23 percent said they had a positive opinion, down from 41 percent last year, according to the survey. It was done in 15 nations, including the United States, this spring by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.
Other countries where positive views dropped significantly include India (56 percent, down from 71 percent); Russia (43 percent, down from 52 percent); and Indonesia (30 percent, down from 38 percent). In Turkey, only 12 percent said they held a favorable opinion, down from 23 percent last year.
Declines were less steep in France, Germany and Jordan, while people in China and Pakistan had a slightly more favorable image of the United States this year than last. In Britain, Washington’s closest ally in the Iraq war, positive views of America have remained in the mid-50-percent range in the past two years, down sharply from 75 percent in 2002, before the war.
A memory from high school in the 90s: One morning as I come to class, a strange heavy-set dork wearing a baseball cap is seated at my desk. He returns my quizzical look with a hostile stare; I find another desk. It turns out he’s an American student visiting a girl in my class on an exchange program of sorts. He has accomplished this by bragging of his outstanding cooking skills and way of ruling the dance floor, both of which are fictional; his hobby is to slack on the couch laughing uncontrollably at sitcoms. A sample of his interaction with the locals:
Bystanding girl: “Real intelligent question.”
Fat American Dork to girl: “Can I do some push-ups on you?”
Fat American Dork is not a typical US citizen. He is emblematic of how a big proportion of earthlings perceive the US as a member of the world society. If nations were to be imagined as individuals, I suspect that something like Fat American Dork is how many would visualize the US.
For some of us, Fat American Dork has advanced in age — though hardly in maturity — and traded a few pounds for a monstrous mustache. In defiance of Congress’ wishes, he is now the US emissary to the world; a psychotic Captain Kangaroo who alienates everyone, most recently Oxford students, and who goes by the name of John Bolton.
Here’s Bolton’s MO as ambassador to the United Nations, as described by Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post:
If Bolton had picked a fight on a worthwhile issue, this might have been justified. But one of the chief aims of his edits was to eliminate all mention of the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, even though these targets for reducing child mortality and so on are inoffensive.
[snip]
Bolton’s next triumph was to demand U.N. reform, or rather to pretend to do so. An effort to create a credible human rights council was underway, but Bolton skipped nearly all of the 30 or so negotiating sessions. Then, when the negotiators produced a blueprint for the new council, Bolton declared it unacceptable, leaving furious American allies to wonder why he hadn’t weighed in earlier to secure a better outcome. “The job now is to get clarity on what the U.S. wants,” the British ambassador said icily. But what Bolton really wanted was quite clear: to allow the negotiations to falter and then to condemn whatever they produced, throwing red meat to his U.N.-hating allies on the right of the Republican Party.
As every last one of those allies know, the UN was devised by Stalin to transform all Americans into cross-dressing, tree-hugging Muslims riding pink bycycles to work while degenerate bureaucrats steal them blind. It’s essential that they never forget this; if the UN were to actually be reformed, they conceivably might.
Guess what? The world is beginning to want its desk back.
