The World's Double Standard

By LANCE MORROW

To Americans, the world's judgment seems to be rigged up to a perverse double standard. Let only a rumor waft through, a propagandist's mischievous fantasy about the CIA's organizing the attack on the Sacred Mosque at Mecca, and rioters swarm like film extras against U.S. consulates from Turkey to India; in Islamabad, Pakistan, two Americans die and the embassy goes up in flames. Let the U.S. admit the deposed Shah for temporary medical treatment, and the Tehran embassy, with all occupants, becomes the property of overheated Shi'ite gunmen. But let four Soviet divisions move in to take possession of another country, and the world's response is somehow muted; the full orchestra of international outrage declines to perform.

Something in these allocations of censure strikes Americans as profoundly unfair. Through their anger over Iran and Afghanistan, there also runs a thin current of self-pity. It bewilders Americans to be hated. It astonishes them to come off second best in a moral comparison with the Soviet Union, with the keepers of the Gulag and the Lubianka, with the oafish jailers of Eastern Europe.

More than merely the Third World's resentment is involved. Americans in a vulnerable time detect even in allies and neighbors a certain selfishness; they experience the little chill a man feels when old friends stop answering his calls. Japan initially responds to the crisis in Tehran by trying to buy up as much Iranian oil as possible. Mexico's President Jose Lopez Portillo gives Jimmy Carter lectures on American behavior; at a crucial moment he refuses to accept the Shah back into his country, despite earlier promises of refuge. Western Europe wants the protection of the American nuclear umbrella but parades a fastidious ambivalence about it.

American sensitivities have been sharpened by the spectacle of the Ayatullah's disgracefully successful tent show. But a nation that lives in a surfeit of images and excitements may have a short memory. Since the U.S. emerged as a superpower at the end of World War II, certain conventions of the historical art form--the assault on the U.S. embassy and the U.S.I.A. library, Uncle Sam burning in effigy, YANKEE GO HOME on the compound walls, the vilification of the "paper tiger"--have become so habitual as to represent a rich tradition. Anti-Americanism has grown in direct proportion to American influence in the world. For Americans now to become so agitated about anti-Americanism bespeaks not strength but skittishness, a faintly disagreeable tendency to ask: "Why are they picking on us? Why don't they pick on the Russians? How did we get to be the bad guys?"

The answers to those questions are historical, cultural, psychological and fascinating. The Soviets and the Americans have gone forth into the world with bizarrely different styles. They have aroused utterly different expectations and fears.

If the strongest anti-Americanism flourishes in the Third World, the most intense historical indictment of the U.S. focuses upon its habit of supporting right-wing antiCommunists, often dictators, against revolutionaries. The U.S. backed Chiang Kai-shek in China, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Diem in Viet Nam --followed by Ky and Thieu. It went along with the colonels in Greece, the Salazar regime hi Portugal, on the theory--often correct but sometimes too lazily embraced--that such regimes were the only alternative to Communism. The U.S. has loosed the CIA to perform unsavory readjustments of leadership here and there. Americans have too often forgotten John Stuart Mill's thought: "A government which needs foreign support to enforce obedience from its own citizens is one which ought not to exist." (It is doubtful that the Soviets ever read that passage.) Much of the Third World believes that U.S. foreign policy seeks repressive stability in regimes round the world so that American business can accumulate maximum profit. Even U.S. foreign aid is taken not as charity but as a kind of reparations fund for offenses past and future. Aside from the usual resentment human nature feels at another's generosity, there is a Third World conviction that the U.S. is impurely promoting its own interests with aid. Few in the Third World believe that the U.S. values humanity more than money.

Russians are stolidly low-profile in their dealings with the outer world (except, of course, when they find an invasion necessary). The Soviets do make themselves obnoxious sometimes (the Egyptians threw them out in 1972), but their cultural penetration round the world is slight. One of their advantages over the U.S. is that they are represented ideologically in many countries by home-grown Communist parties. American influences, on the other hand, are everywhere, gleaming, tempting, polluting; they suggest wealth, power and a barbarically breezy insensitivity to old values. American ways seem to threaten morality and the family. They also arouse envy: the contrast between the American standard of living and that of much of the Third World can be enraging. American prosperity is a reminder of one's own poverty. John Updike's African dictator in his novel The Coup speaks of America as "that fountainhead of obscenity and glut." The U.S., in Third World eyes, is a cultural and economic colonialist, the heir to everything hated in the old colonial powers. The U.S. taps a primordial sense of humiliation and resentment, the memory of what was once conquered and has not yet successfully recovered.

The Soviet Union is a closed and still somewhat enigmatic society. Its leaders are not believed to be sensitive to foreign opinion or outside pressure. The U.S. is regarded as a manically, foolishly open society that leaks state secrets in its newspapers, turns its wars into savage media entertainments, conducts such furious internal debates (including presidential campaigns) that its admirable democratic qualities get lost in a general chaos and indecisiveness. American responsiveness to outside pressures of all kinds actually encourages demonstrations and other anti-American gestures. In a practice bizarre to many foreign eyes, the U.S. pillories itself with an exuberant masochism; it even televises its humiliations, self-doubts, soldiers' atrocities. Then it wonders why the rest of the world joins in the denigration.

The most dangerous development in world opinion is the growing belief that the U.S. is weak, that it has lost the will to act. The demonstrative anti-Americanism of the past few weeks results in part from a sort of contemptuous assurance among rioters that the U.S. will not retaliate. Soviet embassies do not get attacked. You don't pick a fight with a man capable of killing; attack instead that forbearing, civilized gent with the smudge of self-doubt in his eyes. One Southeast Asian diplomat said with brutal scorn last week: "Like your wife, America is always around, ready to get a beating. And you get the feeling that in the end she will not divorce you."

Still, the state of anti-American agitation around the world does not accurately reflect the state of relative affection for the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Plenty of people, including most Eastern Europeans, would riot against the Soviets if they dared; Russia enjoys immunities purchased by its goonily abstracted disregard for the opinions of others. Geography also plays a part. The U.S. is thought to be so far away that the danger of retaliation seems similarly remote. In any case, the world's expectations of Russians are so much lower than of Americans that public opinion is less outraged by Soviet behavior. Russia operates in the world not with a morality but with an ideology, which it pursues with grim and slogging coherence.

It is a mistake to exaggerate foreign antipathy toward the U.S. America is a natural target for all kinds of random discontents ricocheting around on other continents; it is a handy distraction for incompetent leaders when things are not going well. Third World leaders who studied in the U.S., says Taiwan Foreign Affairs Analyst Chang King Yuh, "have found it easy to use the U.S. as scapegoat whenever they have encountered domestic difficulties, since the ammunition to use against the U.S. is so readily available." Authoritarian regimes will always be threatened by the very existence of the U.S. example. The relationship between the U.S. and many Third World countries is elaborate and even Oedipal but, along with envy and frustration, the U.S. also stirs, still, a good deal of neurotic admiration.

In a way, today's anti-Americanism is founded on a misperception. The U.S. is not so weak as many in the world -- or in America -- take it to be. The nation remains militarily, economically and morally powerful -- in the aggregate, far more power ful than Russia. The problem is not lack of strength but a bewilderment of will. The U.S. must decide how its strength should be applied, and if it is willing to pay the inevitably high price for applying strength. French Author Louise Weiss believes that the present American predicament began in "a search for a false popularity," a product of the chagrin over the Viet Nam years. The quest should be abandoned. Americans should recognize and accept the fact that much of world opinion runs against the U.S. now. Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested five years ago that the U.S. should assume a role of minority opposition. Ultimately, the U.S. must appeal, as it has often done successfully, to other people's self-interests. At any rate it must put together a tight, coherent and absolutely consistent body of principles that it rep resents and is willing to act upon. It may be that only by accepting their unpopularity will Americans have some hope of regaining the world's good opinion and respect.

--Lance Morrow

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