By Hwang Eun-seong
In 1958, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick wrote a book called The Ugly American. The United States Information Service tried to ban it, the U.S. Department of State attacked the veracity of the book, and the resulting notoriety caused it to become a runaway success.
The book claims to be a ``slashing expose of American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in Southeast Asia.'' Writing almost 20 years before the final defeat in Vietnam, the authors outlined how and why the U.S. was going to lose the war on communism if it did not change course.
Today a war is not being fought against communism, but terrorism, and criticisms levelled at U.S. foreign policy almost fifty years ago are unfortunately still true today.
How the U.S. has dealt with its allies has led to the quagmire that is Iraq and its war on terror, with explosive consequences worldwide. What is continuing the U.S.'s slide in power?
According to Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, unilateralism is the main cause of current U.S. foreign policy troubles. With the U.S. refusal to work with its allies, disregard of international law and institutions, and President Bush's ``cowboy diplomacy,'' the original meaning of the phrase ``Ugly American'' and exceptionalism had reared its ugly head once again.
While George H.W. Bush was famous for being a multilateralist and declaring a ``New World Order,'' ``Dubya" in sharp contrast is an arch-unilateralist, having rather conspicuously annulled or withdrawn from a range of international agreements and mechanisms such as the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the Chemical Weapons Ban, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
In its second term the Bush administration, while trying to correct the more overtly offensive manifestations of its doctrine, has still tried to ``stay the course."
According to Talbott, three main factors explain this:
(1) repudiation of the Clinton legacy (mentioning ``globalization'' in the Bush White House is taboo _ it was a ``Clinton word," while climate change was ``Gore talk").
(2) Bush's practice of an extreme form of American exceptionalism.
(3) Bush's view of the world in Manichean terms, dividing the world into stark categories of good and evil.
This has led to the catastrophe known as the Iraq war and subsequent other failings in the war on terror. Iraq will haunt U.S. foreign policy for years, with its questionable interventionist strategies, its human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration's infringements on civil liberties in its national security policies, and the consequent waning of U.S. power internationally.
Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning commentator, said that as the best way to measure power in the 21st century is not through dollars or bullets, but by influence, then U.S. power is on the wane at a precipitous pace.
US ``hard power'' and its economic might are still intact, but it is ``soft power'' and influence that is truly winning the hearts and minds in today's arena of global politics. According to Power, to see how American influence has declined, one only has to look at a missile test in North Korea, a defiant nuclear Iran, and an unstable Iraq.
The waning of US power has sparked a second trend, in that freedom is backsliding in nations, which once showed democratic promise. This is becoming ever more prominent in oil-rich countries such as Russia and Venezuela, where human rights abuses are reported with ever more intensity but American criticisms are beginning to have the hollow ring of hypocrisy.
Power claims that ``petro-authoritarianism'' is getting little of the international scrutiny the United States may have once demanded. Indeed, the war on Iraq has had a large if indirect influence on the human rights situation in Russia.
Russia's human rights abuses against the Chechnyans were often ignored in a post-9/11 era when it had supported the Bush administration's War on Terror, using the term ``counter-terrorism'' to justify its own actions. The backdoor diplomacy that the U.S. once used to persuade other countries to toe the line is no longer feasible, and in Latin America a defiant Hugo Chavez is filling the void left by the discrediting of U.S. authority.
Finally, even in the U.S. itself, the administration's moral authority is being undermined. Power mentions that personal freedoms and freedom of the press are being scaled back. In 2001, the Patriot Act gave broad new powers to police forces and intelligence agencies, ostensibly to observe and monitor the communications of suspected terrorists more easily.
It allows the tapping of phones of suspected terrorists and nationwide search warrants for computer information, as well as allowing foreign terror suspects to be held up to seven days before being formally charged or deported. The Patriot Act was controversially renewed in 2006.
Power concludes that ``We need to get the City on the Hill back," by having the Bush administration live up to the values it claims to protect _ words appropriated by the Bush White House such as ``democracy, dignity and liberty.''
The problem is that America still does view itself as the `City upon a Hill,' but as Mr Seymour Lipset once noted, American exceptionalism is a ``double-edged sword.'' It is on the other edge, unfortunately, that American exceptionalism is on today.
Influential change is likely to occur only at the end of the Bush administration and a new president elect takes his place. He or she will still have to contend with the thorny issue of Iraq, the insurgency in Afghanistan, a growing impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the continuing fight between Palestine and Israel, the growth of anti-hegemonism in Latin America, an increasingly assertive China and resurgent Russia, and the fear of home grown terrorists.
Whether a new administration can cast off the ``Ugly American'' stigma and regain its momentum and influence is yet to be seen.
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Hwang Eun-seong is a senior majoring in linguistics and international studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.