Building an American island

"IF YOU BUILD IT, they will stay away." This seems to be the theme of the Bush Administration when you have a chance to I look at the U.S. from the outside. An island of fences--stricter controls over Canadians entering the U.S., isolation on climate change issues, clumsy foreign policy initiatives, limitations on free trade, intelligence failures, and slogging on in the unpopular and unjustified sectarian Iraqi conflict--has come to characterize America in the world. These are the headlines and the ready conversations that you find in Paris these days. Not so much from the French as among Americans.

It is refreshing, if also disappointing, to get outside of the country sometimes and get a feel for other perspectives on the U.S., as I am doing now in Paris--and there are plenty of perspectives. Not only from Americans away from the controlled information atmosphere of the U.S., but from the French and other Europeans, who are mixing across Europe at a rate that counters the restrictiveness being imposed in U.S. isolationism.

The news about the U.S. has its range, but there are consistencies that radiate. The Bush Administration is circling the wagons, they all say, closing America into an island in the vast sea of globalization. The fence along the Mexican border gets attention here as much as it does in Arizona. French TV has been presenting an interview with former Pres. Jimmy Carter in which he argues that it really is not a security fence so much as it is a wall. U.S. passport requirements for travel to and from Canada were highlighted in the International Herald Tribune. Pres. Bush's refusal to accept the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from his own Administration's intelligence services on Iran's nuclear weapons program sheds a terrible tight on Bush's foreign policy capabilities. Global leadership seems out of the question anymore. The U.S. is not in synch with European agendas, including those of its erstwhile allies, at least according to the news here.

This seemed to be especially true in the December 2007 Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia. All of the other industrialized states have gotten on board with the Kyoto Protocol while the U.S. clings to "voluntary" compliance, which means the U.S. can go its own way and ignore the realities of global climate change. Australia hurled out Bush ally John Howard (who lost his reelection bid for prime minister), changed governments, and altered direction on Kyoto compliance.

Back at home, the big news was the recent NIE that stated Iran had stopped its efforts to produce a nuclear weapon in 2003, reversing its 2005 report and completely undermining Bush claims to the contrary. The intelligence reversal was stunning enough, but in the European version of the news, another slant on this was frightening--the suggestion (also put forth in a column by Maureen Dowd that appeared in the International Herald Tribune) that Vice Pres. Dick Cheney held back this information while the Administration rattled sabers and threatened war against Iran. Could the Bush Administration be manipulating information (again) to forge a war? Is America--land of the free and of freedom of information--mired in a manipulated world of half-troths and falsehoods? Is the U.S. a distorted information island?

The Europeans think so and cannot understand it. This is not the U.S. they thought they knew. In Europe, the view of the American island clearly has a different shape than even that of Bush opponents in the U.S. In a Harris survey conducted in November 2007 (even before the devastating revelations on intelligence reversals on Iran and missing CIA torture tapes), majorities in Spain, France, Great Britain, and Germany all believed that the U.S. posed a "major" threat to world peace. More Italians (25%) than Americans (24%) thought that the U.S. was "no threat" to world peace, but they are running against the grain on both continents.

While presidential candidates in the U.S. tried to turn to domestic issues, Europeans in every country except Italy thought that the Iraqi war was the most urgent foreign policy issue. The Italians diverged from the rest to place the Israel-Palestine issue at the top of the scale--not Iran; not Mexican immigrants.

The Europeans agreed with the Americans in the survey that the U.S. is a much weaker country now than it was at the beginning of the Bush Administration. The Europeans put this reduction of global power on the back of George Bush. In each of the nations surveyed, those who thought that Bush has done a good job were in single digits, in contrast with the still minimal 28% of Americans who thought he has done well.

The negative view of George Bush and his presidency in Europe has not contaminated their view of Americans, though. They see the Bush-Cheney Administration as its own island. Americans still are welcome in France and Europe and more English is being spoken than ever before, even in France. The French are not retaliating for "Freedom fries." The Clintons, Al Gore, Barack Obama, and Rudy Giuliani remain popular figures in Europe, and together compose a hopeful picture for the U.S. in 2009 and beyond.