How the world sees Americans

Are these environmental concerns widely discussed in foreign media?

Yes, it's really quite different. Where it plays out is in their sense of the connection to poverty. The Indian prime minister just said something about this at the New Delhi conference on climate change. He said that poverty is their main concern and the Western approach to this is going to restrain our development. They look at it much more from this standpoint: "We are poor and we want to be rich. We don't blame you for being rich but don't keep us poor." That's why, to me, poverty and the environment are the challenges of the 21st century: How do you accommodate the majority of humanity as they rise out of poverty and do that without wrecking the life-support systems in the planet? [The earth's population] is 6 billion people right now, and 1 billion of us live in absolute poverty. Another 2 billion are eating enough but they lack adequate water and shelter.

Half of humanity lives on less than $2 per day, but this is at a time that because of television, the poor -- for the first time in human history -- really do understand how well the rich live. They are not going to continue to accept their impoverished status. Somehow over these next 50 to 100 years, those people will rise up. They are going to escape poverty one way or another. The great challenge facing our civilization globally is how we accommodate that.

If we keep going with the American model -- and I mean the entire high-consumption model -- we're fried. There's no way that we can escape severe climate change and all of the disasters that come with that. That's where the resentment does come from. If we were really serious about being a global leader, that's where we would be putting our energy.

What other issues seemed to come up a lot? What foreign interventions and conflicts? The international criminal court? I know in the beginning of the book you mentioned Israel a bunch of times. What did you hear about?

You do not hear about the criminal court. And Israel, definitely, came up a lot. American foreign policy came up but in a general sense: "You guys are gunslingers." That got articulated vis-`-vis Israel.

The other thing was how we're in their face. Sometimes they complain that our culture is all around the world, although I should add that that really did break down according to generation. If they were young, they tended to like the American model. If they were middle-aged or older, they were very wary and suspicious.

I heard about the death penalty, but that also varied. In Europe there's an abhorrence of the death penalty and our gun culture, whereas if you were in Egypt or southern Africa there's much less of that. If I asked about it in an interview, they said, "Well, you know, we kill people here too."

I guess the other main thing that I heard from everyone was: Why do you guys not pay any attention to us?

That was one of the most interesting things in the book. For example, you write that Americans always ask why Muslims hate us but that Muslims have been saying that Americans hate them for years. What gives other nations the impression that we hate them?

[I was referring to] a wonderful piece of reporting that Sandy Tolan did on NPR. He spent six weeks in the Middle East doing that reporting -- in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Israel. Essentially, what they were saying was drawn on what they see through American media and through Hollywood in particular. "We're portrayed as either greedy oil billionaires or devious terrorists in the same way that during the Cold War the Russians were always the bad guys in all the movies." They said, "We're either stealing money through oil or financial shenanigans or we're taking hostages." And, mind you, this was before Sept. 11 that they were seeing all this stuff.

Add one more twist to the dialectical nature of all this. You may also remember that, in Egypt in particular, American schlock movies with people like Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris and Bruce Willis are very popular. It's about a third of everything that they watch. On the one hand they resent being the objects of scorn in that stuff, but on the other they also like watching Chuck Norris kick the bad guy's ass. It's a very complex phenomenon.

What do you think of our ad campaign that purports to reach out to the Muslim world with images of happy Muslims living in the United States? Do you think they'll see right through it?

Yes. What ails the American image overseas is not going to be fixed by advertising. It's not like Uncle Ben's Rice, which [under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs Charlotte] Beers used to flak for. It's sort of hilariously revealing that that's the American answer: Let's put together Madison Avenue and Hollywood because it's always worked for us before. At the end of the day, it's the policy that matters. That's the case now. You cannot fool people all the time and especially when you start from such a compromised position -- what certainly looks like one-sided support for Israel, continued support for tyrannical regimes in the Arab world and elsewhere. People are not stupid. Whatever they see on television, they still recognize that they can't vote, they can't have meaningful influence over their government and that American firms are still getting preference over local firms in all kinds of aspects of the economy.

Doesn't it also show that we don't understand how sophisticated the rest of the world is?

Sure, but that's one more sign of how little we listen. It was very typical what they did with this ad campaign. They brought in all of these people -- foreign experts, etc. -- and then the State Department told them what a great country we are and how misunderstood we are. Instead of bringing in people and asking them, "What do you think? Tell us honestly. Let us hear from you," and listening with an open mind to the good and bad. That's the fundamental problem -- we don't want to listen. We want to tell. We're so used to being the big boys. The arrogant person never knows they're arrogant and that's the problem with our official stance in the world.

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