A German perspective on the financial crisis and the USA.

From Der Spiegel:

The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. Still, this is no time to gloat.

There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker's tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience's reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president.

Or what is left of him.

Tags: financial crisis

Somehow, I missed this juicy bit of epicurean news...

Oh dear... what does this say about Europe's disdain of the golden arches?

Europe is McDonald's biggest region by revenue, generating 42 percent of sales in the first quarter and 39 percent of operating profit. The U.S. generated 47 percent of profit.

Tags: McDonald's Europe fast-food

The need to paint Americans as a greedy, selfish, war-mongering superpower cannot be disturbed by facts.

An Australian journalist trying to set the record straight:

It matters not that, in the year before the tsunami, the US provided $2.4 billion in humanitarian relief: 40 per cent of all the relief aid given to the world in 2003. Never mind that development and emergency relief rose from $10 billion during the last year of Bill Clinton's administration to $24 billion under George W. Bush in 2003. Or that, according to a German study, Americans contribute to charities nearly seven times as much a head as Germans do. Or that, adjusted for population, American philanthropy is more than two-thirds more than British giving.

There is a teenaged immaturity about the rest of the world's relationship with the US. Whenever a serious crisis erupts somewhere, our dependence on the US becomes obvious, and many hate the US because of it. That the hatred is irrational is beside the point.

We can denounce the Yanks for being Muslim-hating flouters of international law while demanding the US rescue Bosnian Muslims from Serbia without UN authority. We can be disgusted by crass American materialism and ridiculous stockpiling of worldly goods yet also be the first to demand material help from the US when disaster strikes.

The really unfortunate part about this adolescent love-hate relationship with the US is that, unlike most teenagers, many never seem to grow out of it. Within each new generation is a vicious strain of irrational anti-Americanism. But unlike a parent, the US could just get sick of it all and walk away.

Tags: American philanthropy foreign aid disasters

American soft power: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Past experience shows it works...it takes time, but it works. Shouldn't we be supporting it?

From the Wall Street Journal (by subscription only):

Can radio change the world? It used to. On the walls at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here hang pictures of Solidarity rallies in Poland and a smiling Vaclav Havel. The message isn't subtle, or inaccurate: This legendary U.S.-funded broadcaster helped win the Cold War.

The glory days are past at RFE/RL, and for American public diplomacy as a whole. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when history ended and freedom triumphed (or so it seemed), Munich-based RFE/RL landed on the chopping block. It was saved, on a threadbare budget, partly thanks to then Czech President Havel. In gratitude, he offered cheaper digs in a communist-era eyesore here in Prague that previously housed the Czechoslovak Parliament. Yet in the public mind, the station founded in 1950 by the likes of George Kennan and John Foster Dulles might as well be gone.

"We're trying to revive it," says Jeffrey Gedmin, the broadcaster's new president. Doing that, and making the station a valued tool of U.S. foreign policy again, won't be easy.
******
The mission at RFE/RL, a pioneer in U.S. international public broadcasting, didn't end in 1989. It merely moved further east and south. (The Europe in its name is an anachronism; the original Central European stations were shuttered years ago.)

RFE/RL broadcasts in 28 languages to some of the highest-priority and most difficult countries for U.S. foreign policy today. It's the most popular station in Afghanistan (with a 67% market share in a country where radio is the main source of information), and one of the last free broadcast outlets in Russia, Central Asia and Belarus, and the American voice in Persian in Iran.

But there are several strikes against them. The first is the new "media rich" environment. With so much competition from the Internet, podcasts, widespread satellite television and radio -- none of which existed in Cold War days -- the surrogate stations, such as RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia or Radio Marti for Cuba, are struggling to hold on to listeners and influence, along with the rest of old media.

In addition, the "surrogates" suffer from an existential crisis of their own. The nine-person Broadcast Board of Governors, the federal agency responsible for all government-supported international stations, is bipartisan, but deeply politicized and with a reputation for micromanagement. Recent years saw the division blurred between surrogate (epitomized by RFE/RL's stations) and traditional public diplomacy broadcasting that had been the preserve of the Voice of America, which as the name suggests is tasked with explaining U.S. policies to the world.
*******
The quality and professionalism of the stations have come under attack as well, most notably at Radio Farda, the Iranian service, until recently run jointly by RFE/RL and Voice of America. Alhurra, the television broadcaster to the Arabic-speaking world, got into political trouble earlier this year for airing interviews with terrorists. Its director resigned.

The final strike is structural. Government-run agencies tend to be bureaucratic and inertia-bound; in other words, wholly ill-suited for the fast-paced media world. Marc Ginsberg, an Arabic-speaking former U.S. ambassador, says "public diplomacy needs to evolve" and tap the best of America's private sector expertise in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue.
*****
"The editorial content was very weak, and very underwhelming, and in some cases just downright misguided," Mr. Gedmin says. "When I came they thought, 'Oh my gosh, Washington, Bush, neocon.' All I did was I sat down with them day after day and said, 'What kind of groups do you want to reach inside Iran?' And they said, 'Labor, students, women -- a political class open to political change.' And I said, 'Do we do that?' 'Not really,' they said. 'Ok, so what are the issues [they care about]?' I asked." The response: "Economy, corruption are very big. Human rights."

Radio Farda has moved to push these different kinds of stories more forcefully. Its news and commentary is now supposed to be geared at an elite audience.
*****
Most of the region covered by Prague-based stations is on the wrong track, marked by rising authoritarianism (and anti-Americanism), particularly in Russia. Prague has, reprising the role played by Munich, become one meeting point for people interested in championing the free press and democracy in Russia, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia.

In October, the station marked the one year anniversary of the assassination of Russia's best-known journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, with a large conference. A small research team, though a shadow of its Cold War self, looks at media and political trends in its new region. It's probably too small. The McCormick Tribune report notes "substantial analytical research capability" is a "prerequisite for fully effective 'surrogate' broadcasting."

Mr. Gedmin says the radio needs to push further into cell phone texting, podcasts and other new technology to deliver its programming. He hired a new editor for its dowdy Internet site.

With the crackdown on independent voices in Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Russian-language Radio Liberty will have to find new ways to broadcast radio, television and written news and analysis into the country through the Web. "The Russians are kicking us off the air," Mr. Gedmin says. "Pretty soon we're going to have to go to an Internet strategy. If we get it right, it could be the refuge for liberal thought in Russia."

Its effect is hard to gauge and a source of dispute -- in the target countries and in budget battles on Capitol Hill. Radio Farda is listened to by about 13.5% of the radio audience, according to telephone surveys. For all 28 services, the average is 10%. "We care about audience size," Mr. Gedmin says. "Never misunderstand me. But you can't measure our success by audience size alone."

As far as its importance goes, Mr. Gedmin cites all the efforts made by governments to jam the radio signal, block the Web site and publicly denounce RFE/RL. Its journalists, as others in repressive countries, take considerable risks to do their jobs. This year, two RFE/RL reporters have been killed and one kidnapped (and freed after two weeks) in Iraq, two went missing for several weeks in Turkmenistan, two fled Russia, one was detained in Iran for eight months, and two Afghans were threatened with beheading by the Taliban and one kidnapped.

A 26-year-old reporter for the Uzbek service was shot and killed in October in front of his office in Kyrgyzstan. He had told colleagues in Prague that he had been followed by Uzbek security.

Skeptics notice the early changes. "Jeff's the best thing to happen to RFE/RL in a decade," says Enders Wimbush, a vocal critic who headed Radio Liberty in 1987-93 and currently works at Washington's Hudson Institute.

Yet the outcome of Mr. Gedmin's battle to convince Congress that American taxpayers ought to pick up more of the tab won't be known for a while. Its budget, at $77 million this year, is down from $230 million in 1995, when the U.S. cashed the "peace dividend." None of Mr. Gedmin's successors managed to get Capitol Hill to commit any new resources in 12 years.

How to put American public diplomacy in support of democracy back in high gear is an immediate challenge, no matter who ends up living in the White House. Mr. Gedmin wants to get international surrogate broadcasters back into the discussion. "At a time when everybody is arguing 'soft power' is so important, this kind of broadcast is the ultimate in soft power," he says. "It costs peanuts. And it has a measurable impact of success."

Radio Free Europe RFE/RL public diplomacy anti-Americanism

Yankee go home...and can you take me too?

"Many of the insurgents building bombs and carrying out attacks in Iraq are hate-filled teenagers. Diya Muhammad Hussein, 16, is one of them. He spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about his desire to kill the American occupiers -- and his dreams of emigrating to the United States."

Kind of sad that he wants to kill Americans while wanting to emigrate to America. But then, there are so many adults who think the same way... And, while not everyone wishes death on us, it is amazing to hear so many Europeans and others spewing anti-Americanism while they are making plans for their vacations in the US!

insurgents Iraq jihad anti-Americanism

The ABC's of anti-Americanism...a concise guide:

There's a very informative article at the American Thinker that clearly presents what's behind all the anti-Americanism we hear about, and points out this phenomenon has always been around. Excerpt:

Europeans know they will never achieve hard power parity with America, so they want to change the rules of the international game to make soft power the only acceptable superpower standard. Toward this end, European elites seek to de-legitimize one of the main pillars of American influence by making it prohibitively costly in the realm of international public opinion for the United States to use its military power in the future. By ensconcing a system of international law based around the United Nations, they hope to constrain American exercise of power. For Europeans, multilateralism is about neutering American hard power, not about solving international problems. It is, as the cliché goes, about Lilliputians tying down Gulliver.

Many American foreign policy mavens refuse to recognize this. In fact, they often over-idolize European soft power, largely because they share the European belief that a multilateral world order is the proper antidote to global anti-Americanism.
***************************************
Anti-Americanism is (at least for the foreseeable future) a zero-sum game because the main purveyors of anti-Americanism are in denial about the dangers facing the world today. They believe the United States is the problem and that their vision for a post-modern socialist multicultural utopia is the answer. Never mind that most Europeans do not have enough faith in their own model to want to pass it on to the next generation.

This is the dilemma America faces: If it wants to be popular abroad, it will have to pay in terms of reduced security. And if it determines to protect the American way of life from global threats, then it will have to pay in terms of reduced popularity abroad.

But if America loses out against the existential threats posed by global terrorism and fundamentalist Islam, then the issue of America's international image will be moot.

Read the whole thing.

anti-Americanism Europe global war on terror

How to make the world like the US of A.

"The world will shine all the brighter when it’s unburdened by American arrogance and banality. Let’s return to our roots. Good ole’ American isolationism. America, first, now and forever. Return our fleets in the Pacific and Persian Gulf to our shores. Get our troops out of Korea, Germany, the Emirates, wherever. There’s plenty to do here at home. Leave nation building to the Europeans who worked wonders and did their thing in the 20th century. Our beloved land will once again bask in the world’s approval. George McGovern lives, ‘Come Home America.’ To paraphrase the immortal words of one of my fellow artists, we can hold hands, open a Coke and say, “They like us, they really like us.”" Ron Silver has 6 basic steps. Read it all.

American isolationism anti-Americanism

Cuba's Threat to U.S. National Security .

The Heritage Foundation has a featured series called "Cuba at the Crossroads":

Over the next few months, leaders from Congress, the Executive Branch, academia, and the media will come to Heritage to lead focused discussions on the potential role of the United States in shaping post-Castro Cuba, the future of U.S.–Cuba relations, and the role a newly democratic Cuba might play in the hemisphere.

Cuba's Threat to U.S. National Security

The next event will feature a discussion of the many ways that Castro's Cuba threatens U.S. national security. A number of security issues stand out:

• Cuba is aggressively spreading anti-Americanism throughout Latin America and is deeply involved in backing and advising the increasingly totalitarian and virulently anti-U.S. regime of Venezuelan dictator-President Hugo Chávez.
• Since Raul Castro took the reins as acting head of state in 2006, Cuban intelligence services have intensified their targeting of the U.S. Since 9/11, however, U.S. intelligence agencies have reduced the priority assigned to Cuba.
• Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is among the top six intelligence services in the world. Thirty-five of its intelligence officers or agents have been identified operating in the U.S. and neutralized between 1996 and 2003. This is strong evidence of DI's aggressiveness and hostility toward the U.S.
• Cuba traffics in intelligence. U.S. intelligence secrets collected by Cuba have been sold to or bartered with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and other enemies of the United States. China is known to have had intelligence personnel posted to the Cuban Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) site at Bejucal since 2001, and Russia continues to receive Cuban SIGINT information. Additionally, many Cuban intelligence agents and security police are advising Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
• Cuban intelligence has successfully compromised every major U.S. military operation since the 1983 invasion of Grenada and has provided America's enemies with forewarning of impending U.S. operations.
• Beijing is busy working to improve Cuban signals intelligence and electronic warfare facilities, which had languished after the fall of the Soviet Union, integrating them into China's own global satellite network. Mary O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal has noted that this means the Chinese army, at a cyber-warfare complex 20 miles south of Havana, can now monitor phone conversations and Internet transmissions in America.

(Hat tip: Babalu).

Cuba anti-Americanism Heritage Foundation Cuba at the Crossroads

Anti-Americanism American style.

Understanding anti-Americanism made (and harbored) in USA:

The truth is that America not only harbours the most eloquent and noisy anti-Americans in its own breast, it provides a safe haven for people to come from all over the world to condemn it.
***
The Americans who win global approbation in Oslo or at the UN are not simply critics of current American policy. They want to construct an international system that will for ever prevent the US from pursuing its own objectives, a system designed to dilute, counterbalance and constrain America’s ability to govern itself. They prefer a world in which American democracy is subordinated to a kind of global government, rule by a global elite, tasked to make decisions on everyone’s behalf in the name of multilateralism.
***
Fortunately, while the American system may be forgivingly tolerant of people with wild and dangerous ideas, it doesn’t generally let them run the country.

anti-Americanism globalization global government American democracy

Anti-Americanism in Ireland, UK, France...

Fascinating videos on European anti-Americanism. Even young school children in France's elite school are absorbed by it.

There are some amusing moments (French meeting to discuss the terms "airbag" versus "coussin gonfable"), and some very touching scenes, especially Videos 3 and 4, which cover Poland. The Polish clips are a must-see.















anti-Americanism Europe Ireland UK France Poland

Why America doesn't ratify treaties...

Anti-Americanism rears its ugly head whenever the subject of treaties comes up, because the US is perceived to be arrogant by not signing or ratifying "international treaties that the rest of the world endorses".

There are ... two main differences between the American system and the more usual Parliamentary system of dealing with treaties. First, the President can only make Treaties with the consent of two-thirds of the Senate. That is why President Clinton signed Kyoto but did not ratify it, as the Senate voted preemptively 95-0 against consenting to any treaty that was agreed along Kyoto's lines.

Secondly, and more importantly, treaties trump national law, having the same status as the Constitution. This means that activists can take the US Government to court and have national law quashed on the basis of a treaty commitment. Judges can also instruct the Federal Government to take steps to meet treaty commitments.

Read the whole explanation here.

Also,

It is a common misconception that the senate ratifies treaties. The senate does not ratify a treaty. Under the constitution, the senate's function is to consent to a treaty (or decline to do so). It is the president who ratifies. That is, if the senate consents to a treaty by the required two-thirds vote, that act does not operate to make the treaty the law of the land. The president still has to ratify.

The president cannot ratify without senate consent, but the senate's consent does not create an obligation on the president's part to ratify. Moreover, presidents can unilaterally pull us out of treaties — as Bush, for example, did with the ABM treaty and, more recently, with the Optional Protocol to the Treaty on Consular Notification. If ratification were a legislative act, I don't believe a president could reverse it unilaterally — it would have to be done by statute. The president has this power, however, because ratification is an executive act.

anti-Americanism treaties

A Palestinian prayer for the killing of Americans...

"ALLAH, SCATTER THEM!”

“AND TURN THEIR WIVES INTO WIDOWS!”
“AND TURN THEIR CHILDREN INTO ORPHANS!”
“AND GIVE US VICTORY OVER THEM!”

Go visit PMW.

global war on terror anti-Americanism Palestinian Fatah Al-Qadr

Like the kiwi which lost its ability to fly in the absence of predators...

"...young New Zealanders have lost the important roles defense and patriotism play in their own nation's health and security.
...
For millions of years the kiwi thrived in its isolation. However today it is endangered by introduced predators including stoats, dogs, cats, weasels - and just about anything else that is fast enough to catch it. Only human intervention has saved the flightless bird from extinction. Likewise New Zealand has thrived under the global security umbrella provided by the United States and its neighbor Australia. While radical Islam hasn't caught hold in the nation yet, the support of jihadis in Iraq by some in New Zealand along with the nation's anti-American bigotry should give New Zealanders pause for one important reason:

The weasel is a greater threat to the kiwi than to the eagle."

Read it all at Dean's World.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

anti-Americanism New Zealand the kiwi and the eagle

"Finally, someone is striking back at the Americans!"

9/11 Denmark anti-Americanism Jens Blauenfeldt

Ugly Anti-Americanism.

Read Norman Podhoretz's "America the Ugly" in Opinion Journal. Here's an excerpt:

As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

...those who thought that we had brought 9/11 down on ourselves and had it coming were in a very tiny minority--even tinier than the antiwar movement of the early '60s. On the other hand, they were much stronger at a comparably early stage of the game than their counterparts of the '60s (who in some cases were their own younger selves). The reason was that, as the Vietnam War ground inconclusively on, the institutions that shape our culture were one by one and bit by bit converting to the "faith in America the ugly." By now, indeed, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of these sectors of the culture was limited to their inhabitants. John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

The few people I knew who shared my apprehensions believed that if things went well on the military front of what we were calling World War IV (the Cold War having in our scheme of things been World War III), all would be well on the home front too. And that was how it appeared from the effect wrought by the Afghanistan campaign, the first front to be opened in World War IV. For a short spell, the spectacular success of that campaign dampened the nascent antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses. But I felt certain that, as other fronts were opened--with Iraq most likely being the next--opposition not only would grow but would become more and more extreme.

I turned out to be right about this, and yet even I never imagined that the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach. Nor did I anticipate how closely the antiwar playbook of that era would be followed and how successfully it would be applied to Iraq, even though the two wars had nothing whatever in common.

global war on terror Islamofaschism World War IV anti-Americanism anti-war

Anti-Jews, anti-Israel, anti-Semites.

Read Victor Davis Hanson's piece about the new version of the old anti-Semitism. Excerpt:

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate -- of a magnitude not seen in over 70 years -- is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists.

The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays their existential hatred.
...
The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land -- whether in Cyprus or Tibet -- unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China and Cuba.

...
This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics -- and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.

That someone is -- no surprise -- once again Jews.

anti-Semitism Israel Jews anti-Americanism

"Newly-elected conservative European leaders did not win their elections because they are pro-American, they won despite it..."

PJM correspondent Michael van der Galien reports that: "Although the American-European relationship is likely to improve in the coming years, it would be a mistake to assume that the shift to the right is caused by the anti-Americanism of the left or by the pro-Americanism of the right. Sarkozy, Wilders and Merkel did not garner support because they were close to the US: they won as many seats as they did because of domestic issues."

(Thanks to Instapundit.)

anti-Americanism Europe

Europe doesn't like US.

According to Der Spiegel:

A new survey of European attitudes toward America released this week holds that: We share your fear of terrorists. We don't like Bush. And we don't necessarily plan on being nice once he's gone. At the same time, another world poll adds: And, please, leave Iraq.

global war on terror Iraq anti-Americanism German Marshall Fund Europe poll

Hatred against Americans.

According to CNN:

"The main motivation of the group in Germany is hatred against American citizens, and therefore they had as main targets the American military installations," said Jorg Ziercke, president of Germany's Federal Criminal Investigation Office.

"This could also of course have affected German citizens in restaurants and other places."

global war on terror anti-Americanism Islam
Germany

Anti-Americanism is deeper but not wider...

according to a Pew report released last June:

[anti-Americanism] [Pew]