World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [122]
Global markets may well hold the key to long-term greater prosperity for the poor and not-so-poor countries of the world. But like Latin America’s European-blooded elites or Southeast Asia’s hypercapitalized Chinese, America has a massive head start over the rest of the world. Thomas Friedman suggested a few years ago that America is “the country that benefits most from today’s global integration.” Friedman was recently corroborated by a 2002 New York Times report indicating that the United States, rather than the developing world, has been the overwhelming beneficiary of globalization. “Perhaps aside from China the only country that appears to have benefited unambiguously from the trend toward open markets worldwide is the United States, where a huge inflow of capital has helped allow Americans to spend more than they save, and to import more than they export.” The report goes on to quote financier and philanthropist George Soros: “The trend of globalization is that surplus capital is moving from the periphery countries to the center, which is the United States.”
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Global Backlash
Like the market dominance of any minority in the world, American market dominance provokes intense resentment. Indeed, the rest of the world, if anything, exaggerates America’s disproportionate wealth and power. Just as Russian hate-sites insist that “Yids control the entire economy,” and just as indigenous Burmans often say that “the Chinese control all Mandalay,” many in the world today see America as “controlling the global economy,” either through its multinationals or its “puppets,” the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Like resentment against market-dominant minorities in individual countries, anti-Americanism around the world is not a monolithic phenomenon. In some countries, anti-Americanism is particularly fierce among the elite, who in turn foment anti-American sentiment among the lower classes. Some have suggested that this is true of France. In other countries, anti-Americanism originates among the lower classes, who—even as they covet Nike sweatshirts and Madonna CDs—see and resent America as the powerful extension and protector of their own corrupt elites. This is true of many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
As with resentment against other market-dominant minorities, anti-Americanism is often a perverse blend of admiration, awe, and envy on one hand and seething hatred, disgust, and contempt on the other. Thus, for millions, perhaps billions, around the world, America is “arrogant,” “hegemonic,” and “vapidly materialistic”—but also where they would go if only they could. In Beijing, for example, many of the same screaming students who bombarded the U.S. embassy with stones after the U.S. bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade returned a few weeks later to line up for U.S. visas. One of them, interviewed by U.S. News & World Report, explained that he wanted to attend graduate school in America and that “If I could have good opportunities in the U.S., I wouldn’t mind U.S. hegemony too much.” Similarly, in another interview with U.S. News, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Costa Rica’s former president who won a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace in Central America, charged that America “want[s] to tell the world what to do. You are like the Romans of the new millennium.” Yet Arias vacations in the United States and has a son at Harvard and a daughter who graduated from Boston College.
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Another example of the world’s love-hate relationship with the United States was seen when a quarter million Brazilians packed into a Rio de Janeiro concert hall to ogle U.S. teen pop idol Britney Spears. Delirious with adoration, the crowd nevertheless hissed and booed when she waved an American flag.
9 And many, of course, have pointed