What Our Friends Say About Their Neighbors

I was in the UAE when Iranian President Ahmadinejah spoke at Columbia, so I watched coverage of the event on Al Jazeera, and got to talk about Iran a lot with others in the UAE. The emirati I talked to-- mainly fairly religious young people-- were positive about Ahmadinejah. They respected his populist vibe (although I understand he is criticized by many in Iran for failing to fulfill domestic campaign promises and instead focusing on the United States) and pointed out how his relatively austere, restrained lifestyle was in keeping with his politics.

A criticism of their own government may have been implicit in their remarks, or maybe I just heard what I wanted. In either case, there is a major difference in the governing structure of a state that has flawed elections in which case people elect a leader who tells them they deserve more as citizens and a state in which the non-elected royalty reward their population with non-obligatory largesse as they see fit.

I have to take political opinions in the UAE with a grain of salt because there is so much censorship and propaganda. In general, I'm finding it hard to get information I trust about Iran. I'm confident Ahmadinejah has made choices I would consider reprehensible. However, he has support for a reason, and I think it's important for the US to move beyond demonizing him to examine whether he is popular because of his criticism of America, or because of his efforts to combat inequality.

In a way, the way I feel about China is similar to the way I feel about Iran. Understanding both better is crucial to shaping our policy, but I can't get a handle on how much we should worry-- and in what ways. In Japan, there seems to be a lot of below-the-surface fear about China, but I haven't gotten to really discuss it with Japanese people yet.

I'd read about China's military and economic rise, and the arguments critiquing its strength, and at first to me it read a little like a play for attention by old school political scientists who hadn't been able to escape the Cold War mindset. It reminded me of John Mearshiemer's argument that Germany would rise again and rue the day! There were also concerns that Japan was going to eat us alive during the tail end of its financial boom.

Then I went to Dar es Salaam. Almost every businessman I saw in Tanzania was Chinese. Every single major construction project was built by a Chinese company. Brand new roads stretched across Northern Tanzania, courtesy of China. Yes, the point of the roads was often to get ore from the Mwanza area to seaside ports faster, but people also used them to get their goods to market, go to secondary school and see distant relatives.

One of my traveling buddies was half Chinese and half Caucasian, and she fielded a lot of questions about whether she spoke Chinese and whether she had ever been to China. Rumor had it that wealthy Tanzanians wanted Chinese nannies for their children so that they would grow up speaking Chinese. Even in more rural parts of the country, people were fascinated by China. They saw it as the "developing country that could."

For most of the twentieth century, even when people disliked the policy of the American government, I think they liked or admired things about "Americanness." We were the land of plenty, of possibility, of dreams. We were internally conscious of this. There's a body of literature that claims the Supreme Court was heavily influenced by the way segregation lend itself to effective anti-American Soviet propaganda. I'm nervous to make this claim-- I sort of feel like anyone born after 1980 has to struggle to get a handle on the Cold War-- but I do believe we won the Cold War because of the strength of our system of government, not the strength of our military or economy. (That was a set up for an argument about hard power versus soft power, but I'm skeptical of the dichotomy and will save it for another ramble.)

This is the decade when the world is falling quite out of love with America. We can engage other countries more in diplomacy, overhaul economic policy in an effort to save the dollar or pull out of Iraq, but I think a shift in attitudes towards Americanness (rather than America or the American government) is alarming because you can't prescribe a solid fix for a shift in attitudes.

A large part of this shift is undoubtedly due to the Iraq War and our Middle East policies. There's a story told that leaders like Ahmadinejah dislike America because of its secularism, but I think this is usually a way to escape critically examining our policy decisions. Some of it may be due to the rise of alternate powers like the EU and China (gotta love the fairy tale potential of the developing country that could). I think it's plausible, though, that part of it is due to increasing inequality within the US. We look more and more like the land of inequality and less like the land of plenty.

I once read that while Communist states during the Cold War could profess to offer equality of outcome, the United States could promise more equality of opportunity. I imagine any story about racial profiling gets substantial global media playing time (it definitely did on Al Jazeera) and this pokes holes in the idea of the American dream. So does our ever increasing Gini index and the fact that the children of rich people tend to stay rich and vice versa.

Of course, there are many reasons to be concerned about inequality in America other than the fact that it may reduce our global capital, and there are many reasons we have less global capital besides domestic inequality. I just think the potential links is interesting.