Teh One Who Knocks
05-20-2020, 10:01 AM
BY RICHARD STENGEL - Vanity Fair
https://i.imgur.com/YmJxRkih.jpg
Over the past two decades, America’s image around the world shifted in a significant and unexpected way. With the rise of Silicon Valley, our brand morphed from the bellicose and muscle-bound superpower (see the invasion of Iraq) to the land of innovation and technological competence. In the global mental map of America, Apple, Google, and Facebook replaced McDonald’s, Boeing, and General Motors as symbols of the USA. We were no longer the knuckle-dragging hegemon—we were nimble and creative. To billions of people around the world, America had unlocked the secret of the 21st-century economy and everyone else wanted a part of it.
When I was under secretary of state for public diplomacy during the Barack Obama administration—the job that is essentially the chief marketing officer for the American brand around the world—I found that the most common request I got from international diplomats and leaders was, could I help them get in touch with the Silicon Valley tech companies? Would I introduce them to someone at Google, Apple, and Facebook? Our brand differentiator was no longer drones, Tomahawks, and foreign assistance—though all of them still mattered—it was search, likes, and Twitter. No, we weren’t as generous and deep-pocketed as we once had been, nor could we build bridges and highways like China was doing, but we were seen as the land of the future, and people wanted to know how we did it. It was a welcome change.
But the election of Donald Trump and our inept response to the coronavirus has reversed much of that. Even when we were the arrogant and galumphing superpower—a continuation of the Ugly American stereotype from the 1950s—we were always seen as competent. Yes, we were headstrong and naive, but we got things done. Now, thanks to the combination of Trump’s much-mocked America First doctrine and his administration’s chaotic and chuckleheaded response to the coronavirus, the Trump administration has recast our brand in a new way: the bungling superpower. The country that created the iPhone could not figure out how to manufacture enough cotton swabs. While Germany is led by a woman with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, the U.S. president was suggesting that people inject disinfectant to cure the virus.
Last week, in a rare move in its nearly 200-year history, the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial saying that the U.S. had fallen from what it once was, the gold standard in disease detection and control, and must not reelect a president who prized partisanship above science. A poll in France earlier this month found that Angela Merkel, and not the American president, was overwhelmingly regarded as the leader of the free world. Only 2% of those polled said Trump was heading in the right direction. A Bosnian TV journalist proclaimed that the White House was dysfunctional and America was beginning to resemble the Balkans. The Balkans.
Many people have cited the line from the Irish Times that “the world has loved, hated, and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it.” That’s not quite right. The emotion is not pity, but schadenfreude: people around the world are taking a secret pleasure in the U.S.’s ineptitude. They feel the U.S is getting payback for its self-righteousness, boasting, and incessant lecturing. It’s karmic retribution, not pity.
But there’s a greater and more existential threat to American influence than the scorn people around the world have for Trumpism: it is the increasing non-essentialness of America among nations and the discrediting of the American model of governance and capitalism. Madeleine Albright liked to say, “We are the indispensable nation.” Under Trump and COVID-19, we’ve become as dispensable as a pair of latex surgical gloves.
As the world celebrated the 75th anniversary of VE Day a couple of weeks ago, the generous and capable America of the Marshall Plan and the CARE package was nowhere to be seen. At a convocation of world leaders organized by the European Union to raise billions to fight the coronavirus, the U.S. was conspicuously absent. The United States, French president Emmanuel Macron said, “is on the sidelines.”
With the spiking of America’s death toll from the virus, the images of nurses in New York City wearing garbage bags for personal protection circulated around the globe. One E.U. official diplomatically described this image as having “dimmed the appeal of the U.S.–model.” In a story about the massive unemployment numbers in the U.S., Le Monde commented in a headline that America “has never seemed so fragile.” We looked like a failed first-world state.
For much of the world, “America First” seems less like a policy than confirmation of what they have always thought about American attitudes. But it seemed to be a literal proclamation of U.S. foreign policy when German media reported that the Trump administration was trying to negotiate for exclusive access to a vaccine developed by German scientists. Argentina’s La Nación recently declared that “in pandemics there are builders and destroyers” and that Trump is the latter.
We’ve long been the land of technology, but it’s something new when an American president boasts about an experimental hypersonic missile by saying, “I call it the super-duper missile.” Yet there are some things about Trump that are familiar to foreign governments—authoritarian governments, that is. After decades of preaching transparency and rule of law as part of our public diplomacy, the U.S. now has a president who has his son-in-law leading the fight against the virus, his daughter as one of his chief advisors, and awards contracts to his rich and powerful friends. This has the Russians and the Saudis and the Chinese high-fiving each other.
Trump’s self-dealing nepotism undermines one of the foundations of our public diplomacy: the promotion of democracy, transparency, and the rule of law. We’ve spent billions over the years helping countries establish constitutions, court and legal systems, and hold elections. But Trump’s refrain of “rigged” races—which will surely come into play again this year—has given talking points to every authoritarian leader around the world. The botched election in Wisconsin in the midst of a pandemic has made us look foolish and unreliable. We’ve preached the value of meritocracy in both government and higher education. The college-admissions cheating scandal has made our self-proclaimed meritocracy look phony. This is all welcome news to China and Russia; their anti–U.S. propaganda only becomes more effective when we sabotage ourselves.
The great competition in global public diplomacy today is between America’s democratic capitalism and China’s state-directed capitalism. China’s aggressive “mask diplomacy”—where they ship personal protective equipment and doctors around the world—seeks to fill the vacuum of U.S. leadership and raise questions about American competence. China’s gigantic Belt and Road Initiative, a global development consortium involving some 70 economies and over 60% of the world’s population, is now touting a Health Silk Road initiative that will provide development aid for countries battling the pandemic. This is the kind of thing that America once did. At the same time, Chinese propaganda about the U.S. has become more hard-edged and vitriolic. China’s Global Times, the English-language version of the state-owned People’s Daily, recently described the U.S. as becoming “increasingly irrational.” The editor of the paper recently tweeted that the “US’ system used to be appealing to many Chinese people. But through the pandemic, Chinese saw US government’s incompetence in outbreak control, disregard for life and its overt lies.”
The Chinese are acutely aware that the virus originated there, and that Trump is now basing his reelection campaign on the demonization of their country. But with public diplomacy, it’s not where you start but where you finish. They are betting that billions of dollars in aid to countries to help defeat the virus and recover afterward will be remembered long after where the virus originated. Particularly if the U.S. has a second and third wave after reopening prematurely.
China, of course, remains very unpopular in U.S. opinion polls. In a show of bravado, Trump said on Fox Business last week, “We could cut off the whole relationship.” Really? China holds about $1 trillion of our debt. China is the leading manufacturing nation in the world (the U.S. is number two), accounting for 20% of the world’s output. That output includes, according to the Commerce Department, 97% of America’s antibiotics. Even as China outpaced us as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, the rise of Silicon Valley seemed to show that American creativity and innovation could keep us on top. But as China’s factories begin to roll back into action, and with its economy functioning at 80-90% capacity as of early April, it is likely to increase the distance between our two nations. For the foreseeable future, its financial assistance around the world will likely dwarf ours. I remember when I was at the State Department visiting with an African foreign minister, who at the end of our discussion, smiled at me and said, “You Americans come and talk to me about human rights and transparency. The Chinese come and build me a super highway. Who do you think I’m going to listen to?”
Every crisis has its winners and losers. Right now, the winners in the fight against the coronavirus are New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and Canada—countries that reacted quickly, did not panic, and used science and data to combat the virus. It remains to be seen how China and Russia will be perceived. But to use a title from Trump’s beloved reality TV, we are The Biggest Loser.
RBP
https://i.imgur.com/YmJxRkih.jpg
Over the past two decades, America’s image around the world shifted in a significant and unexpected way. With the rise of Silicon Valley, our brand morphed from the bellicose and muscle-bound superpower (see the invasion of Iraq) to the land of innovation and technological competence. In the global mental map of America, Apple, Google, and Facebook replaced McDonald’s, Boeing, and General Motors as symbols of the USA. We were no longer the knuckle-dragging hegemon—we were nimble and creative. To billions of people around the world, America had unlocked the secret of the 21st-century economy and everyone else wanted a part of it.
When I was under secretary of state for public diplomacy during the Barack Obama administration—the job that is essentially the chief marketing officer for the American brand around the world—I found that the most common request I got from international diplomats and leaders was, could I help them get in touch with the Silicon Valley tech companies? Would I introduce them to someone at Google, Apple, and Facebook? Our brand differentiator was no longer drones, Tomahawks, and foreign assistance—though all of them still mattered—it was search, likes, and Twitter. No, we weren’t as generous and deep-pocketed as we once had been, nor could we build bridges and highways like China was doing, but we were seen as the land of the future, and people wanted to know how we did it. It was a welcome change.
But the election of Donald Trump and our inept response to the coronavirus has reversed much of that. Even when we were the arrogant and galumphing superpower—a continuation of the Ugly American stereotype from the 1950s—we were always seen as competent. Yes, we were headstrong and naive, but we got things done. Now, thanks to the combination of Trump’s much-mocked America First doctrine and his administration’s chaotic and chuckleheaded response to the coronavirus, the Trump administration has recast our brand in a new way: the bungling superpower. The country that created the iPhone could not figure out how to manufacture enough cotton swabs. While Germany is led by a woman with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, the U.S. president was suggesting that people inject disinfectant to cure the virus.
Last week, in a rare move in its nearly 200-year history, the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial saying that the U.S. had fallen from what it once was, the gold standard in disease detection and control, and must not reelect a president who prized partisanship above science. A poll in France earlier this month found that Angela Merkel, and not the American president, was overwhelmingly regarded as the leader of the free world. Only 2% of those polled said Trump was heading in the right direction. A Bosnian TV journalist proclaimed that the White House was dysfunctional and America was beginning to resemble the Balkans. The Balkans.
Many people have cited the line from the Irish Times that “the world has loved, hated, and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it.” That’s not quite right. The emotion is not pity, but schadenfreude: people around the world are taking a secret pleasure in the U.S.’s ineptitude. They feel the U.S is getting payback for its self-righteousness, boasting, and incessant lecturing. It’s karmic retribution, not pity.
But there’s a greater and more existential threat to American influence than the scorn people around the world have for Trumpism: it is the increasing non-essentialness of America among nations and the discrediting of the American model of governance and capitalism. Madeleine Albright liked to say, “We are the indispensable nation.” Under Trump and COVID-19, we’ve become as dispensable as a pair of latex surgical gloves.
As the world celebrated the 75th anniversary of VE Day a couple of weeks ago, the generous and capable America of the Marshall Plan and the CARE package was nowhere to be seen. At a convocation of world leaders organized by the European Union to raise billions to fight the coronavirus, the U.S. was conspicuously absent. The United States, French president Emmanuel Macron said, “is on the sidelines.”
With the spiking of America’s death toll from the virus, the images of nurses in New York City wearing garbage bags for personal protection circulated around the globe. One E.U. official diplomatically described this image as having “dimmed the appeal of the U.S.–model.” In a story about the massive unemployment numbers in the U.S., Le Monde commented in a headline that America “has never seemed so fragile.” We looked like a failed first-world state.
For much of the world, “America First” seems less like a policy than confirmation of what they have always thought about American attitudes. But it seemed to be a literal proclamation of U.S. foreign policy when German media reported that the Trump administration was trying to negotiate for exclusive access to a vaccine developed by German scientists. Argentina’s La Nación recently declared that “in pandemics there are builders and destroyers” and that Trump is the latter.
We’ve long been the land of technology, but it’s something new when an American president boasts about an experimental hypersonic missile by saying, “I call it the super-duper missile.” Yet there are some things about Trump that are familiar to foreign governments—authoritarian governments, that is. After decades of preaching transparency and rule of law as part of our public diplomacy, the U.S. now has a president who has his son-in-law leading the fight against the virus, his daughter as one of his chief advisors, and awards contracts to his rich and powerful friends. This has the Russians and the Saudis and the Chinese high-fiving each other.
Trump’s self-dealing nepotism undermines one of the foundations of our public diplomacy: the promotion of democracy, transparency, and the rule of law. We’ve spent billions over the years helping countries establish constitutions, court and legal systems, and hold elections. But Trump’s refrain of “rigged” races—which will surely come into play again this year—has given talking points to every authoritarian leader around the world. The botched election in Wisconsin in the midst of a pandemic has made us look foolish and unreliable. We’ve preached the value of meritocracy in both government and higher education. The college-admissions cheating scandal has made our self-proclaimed meritocracy look phony. This is all welcome news to China and Russia; their anti–U.S. propaganda only becomes more effective when we sabotage ourselves.
The great competition in global public diplomacy today is between America’s democratic capitalism and China’s state-directed capitalism. China’s aggressive “mask diplomacy”—where they ship personal protective equipment and doctors around the world—seeks to fill the vacuum of U.S. leadership and raise questions about American competence. China’s gigantic Belt and Road Initiative, a global development consortium involving some 70 economies and over 60% of the world’s population, is now touting a Health Silk Road initiative that will provide development aid for countries battling the pandemic. This is the kind of thing that America once did. At the same time, Chinese propaganda about the U.S. has become more hard-edged and vitriolic. China’s Global Times, the English-language version of the state-owned People’s Daily, recently described the U.S. as becoming “increasingly irrational.” The editor of the paper recently tweeted that the “US’ system used to be appealing to many Chinese people. But through the pandemic, Chinese saw US government’s incompetence in outbreak control, disregard for life and its overt lies.”
The Chinese are acutely aware that the virus originated there, and that Trump is now basing his reelection campaign on the demonization of their country. But with public diplomacy, it’s not where you start but where you finish. They are betting that billions of dollars in aid to countries to help defeat the virus and recover afterward will be remembered long after where the virus originated. Particularly if the U.S. has a second and third wave after reopening prematurely.
China, of course, remains very unpopular in U.S. opinion polls. In a show of bravado, Trump said on Fox Business last week, “We could cut off the whole relationship.” Really? China holds about $1 trillion of our debt. China is the leading manufacturing nation in the world (the U.S. is number two), accounting for 20% of the world’s output. That output includes, according to the Commerce Department, 97% of America’s antibiotics. Even as China outpaced us as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, the rise of Silicon Valley seemed to show that American creativity and innovation could keep us on top. But as China’s factories begin to roll back into action, and with its economy functioning at 80-90% capacity as of early April, it is likely to increase the distance between our two nations. For the foreseeable future, its financial assistance around the world will likely dwarf ours. I remember when I was at the State Department visiting with an African foreign minister, who at the end of our discussion, smiled at me and said, “You Americans come and talk to me about human rights and transparency. The Chinese come and build me a super highway. Who do you think I’m going to listen to?”
Every crisis has its winners and losers. Right now, the winners in the fight against the coronavirus are New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and Canada—countries that reacted quickly, did not panic, and used science and data to combat the virus. It remains to be seen how China and Russia will be perceived. But to use a title from Trump’s beloved reality TV, we are The Biggest Loser.
RBP