Rhetoric vs. Reality

U.S. President George W. Bush's administration's ideological rhetoric concerning U.S. policy in the Middle East has become separated from the policy itself to an extent almost reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. According to the rhetoric, the United States has adopted democratization as the core of its political strategy and made a clean break with its past strategy of propping up local dictatorships and playing one country and ethno-religious group against another.

In practice -- especially since the latest conflict in Lebanon -- U.S. strategy relies entirely on the ability of pro-American authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to control the anger of their populations at U.S. and Israeli policies. To help keep these Sunni regimes in line, Washington relies on their fear of an expansion of Iranian and Shiite influence. This is precisely the dominant U.S. strategy of the past generation, except for periods when Saddam Hussein's Iraq replaced Iran as the chief regional bogeyman. Bush's language of democracy is also accompanied by utter contempt for the views of potential voters in the region.

This glaring clash between rhetoric and reality is odd, but much odder is the degree to which it has gone un-remarked by the U.S. political class and even most of the media. Of course, criticisms have been raised on both the left and right. But the Democratic Party and the U.S. media have not made nearly as much of this contradiction, and the dangers it embodies, as one might have expected.

One reason why so much of the United States goes along unquestioningly with ?Bush's rhetoric concerns the nature of American nationalism. The belief that it is the United State's national right, duty and destiny to spread democracy and freedom in the world is ingrained in most Americans from early childhood. This belief stems from the faith in the Constitution, law and democracy that forms the so-called "American creed," the foundation of America's collective national identity. In the words of the great U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter: "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one."

This American creed shares with Soviet communism the belief that it is applicable not just to its host nation, but to all mankind. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the Americans "are unanimous upon the general principles that ought to rule human society," and this is no less true at the start of the 21st century than it was in the 1830s.

The nationalist myths attendant on the creed include a widespread belief that the United States is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom and that it is, therefore, exceptionally good. Because the United States is exceptionally good, it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends. The creed is therefore also a foundation of belief in the United States' innate innocence. So, if as has often been said, Bush occupies a kind of ideological bubble, it is a bubble made of steel and he shares it with tens or even hundreds of millions of other Americans.

Of course, much of the strengths of these beliefs about the United States' mission come from the fact that in the past they have proved true: in Germany and Japan after 1945 and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The creed also makes the U.S. exercise of direct empire less likely, for it enforces at least a surface respect for democracy and self-determination.

But the core problem for American mainstream thinkers and voters is that because their perceptions are drawn from ingrained beliefs, not empirical study, they cannot easily learn from evidence, experience or the views of ordinary people elsewhere in the world. Nor can they easily distinguish one historical case from another: Poland from Ukraine, post-war Japan from the modern Middle East.

Americans' sense of national mission resembles to an extent the belief of the great European imperial nations of the past that they were spreading "civilization" and "progress" to the rest of the world. Like those beliefs, it embodies elements of reality along with lies and hypocrisy. But neither evidence nor the views of the outside world count for much, given the depth of the nationalist belief itself. European nations in the 20th century had these nationalist faiths beaten out of them by repeated catastrophes. We can only hope that Americans will learn from their examples before it is too late.

Anatoly Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. His next book, "Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World," co-authored by John Hulsman, is to be published later this month. This comment was published in the Financial Times.