World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [120]
1
Why do they hate us? Amidst grief, anger, patriotism, defiance, and retaliation, stunned Americans have repeatedly returned to this question. This chapter will offer one, certainly not the only, answer.
America today has become the world’s market-dominant minority. Like the Chinese in the Philippines or the Lebanese in West Africa, Americans have attained heights of wealth and economic power wildly disproportionate to our tiny numbers. Just 4 percent of the world’s population, America dominates every aspect—financial, cultural, technological—of the global free markets we have come to symbolize. From the Islamic world to China, from our NATO allies to the southern hemisphere, America is seen (not incorrectly) as the engine and principal beneficiary of global marketization. For this—for our extraordinary market dominance, our seeming global invincibility—we have earned the envy, fear, and resentment of much of the rest of the world. Of course, not everyone who envies and resents us wants to destroy us. But there are those who do.
Anti-Americanism around the world is, among other things, an expression at the global level of popular, demagogue-fueled mass resentment against a market-dominant minority. The expression of this resentment varies enormously in intensity, ranging from benign grumbling by French bureaucrats about bad films and bad food to strategic alliances between Russia and China to terrorism. Like the ethnic cleansing of Tutsi in Rwanda, the suicidal mass murder of three thousand innocents on American soil was the ultimate expression of group hatred. The attack on America was an act of revenge directly analogous to the bloody confiscations of white land in Zimbabwe, or the anti-Chinese riots and looting in Indonesia—fueled by the same feelings of envy, grievance, inferiority, powerlessness, and humiliation.
As with Jewish market dominance in the Middle East or Kikuyu economic success in Kenya, the reasons for America’s global market dominance are the subject of bitter dispute. On one view, American economic success is the result of our superior institutions, entrepreneurial spirit, and generations of hard work. On another view, our wealth and power are the spoils of plunder, exploitation, and exclusion. Even within the United States, tempers flare over which view is correct. The reality is that both carry more than a grain of truth.
On the other hand, there is astonishing global consensus on one point: that America has become the world’s unrivaled market-dominant minority.
Market-Dominant America
Whether you ask an Egyptian imam, a Wall Street banker, or France’s foreign minister, there is striking agreement that the United States, as a country, dominates, drives, perpetuates, and disproportionately prospers from the spread of global capitalism around the world. The facts support this perception.
To begin with, it is barely exaggerating to say that the United States is responsible for the worldwide spread of free markets. No one has established this more evocatively than Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Today’s universal prescription of Privatization + Deregulation + Economic Liberalization “was made in America and Great Britain,” writes Friedman. The Electronic Herd—Friedman’s term for today’s millions of anonymous traders and investors “moving money around the world with the click of a mouse”—“is led by American Wall Street bulls.”
At the same time, “[t]he most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investment is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for globalization