NEW YORK -- "What do you think of the idea of our Peace Corps?" President Kennedy once asked Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India. A good plan, Nehru answered; young Americans can learn a lot from Indian villagers.
The American was not amused; he thought the Indian arrogant. But Nehru was right, and the arrogance was ours. The major impact of sending tens of thousands of Americans abroad over the past 35 years has been to create alumni who actually have a feel for the world and America's role in far off places.
Unfortunately, there are not enough of them -- Americans capable of or interested in seeing the world as others see it, or seeing ourselves as others see us.
U.S. government, businesses and news organizations are sending fewer people abroad. Of course, sending people to other countries costs more than hiring locals (or eliminating jobs). So why should we leave the comforts of home when we can run the global economy, or digitally connected planet, from Washington and New York?
America is on a roll. America is losing it.
Those statements may seem contradictory, but I don't think they are. The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the world, dictating political, economic and military terms to other countries whenever it suits our purposes. And because of the power and reach of our popular culture, most everyone in the world knows a great deal about us, whether we even know they exist. But in the oldest of stories, the more power we accumulate, the less judicious or careful we seem to be in using it.
How do we look to an ordinary Italian? A U.S. Marine Corps jet plane, based on Italian soil, flies into a valley on a clear day at 621 mph, more than 100 mph over its mandated limit, at an altitude of less than 400 feet, which is 1,600 feet below its flight-plan limit, and strikes the cable of a ski gondola that has been strung across the valley for more than 30 years. Twenty people in the cable car, all Europeans, plunge to their deaths. Is it what used to be called "Blame America First" to be shocked or outraged when the Marines find the pilot did nothing wrong?
How do we look to an ordinary Scot, who works in a factory making cashmere sweaters? The United States is putting tariffs of more than 100 percent on such products because Europeans are not buying enough U.S. bananas.
Oh, you thought Americans don't grow bananas? We don't -- except for a few bunches in Hawaii. But the U.S. government is charging the governments of Great Britain and France with rigging trade rules to buy bananas from their one-time Caribbean colonies rather than from American-owned companies in Central America. Is this fight necessary?
That is to say nothing about how we look to ordinary Iraqis as the bombs fall and the missiles fly day after day, because our planes are flying over their country and, we say, their air-defense radars are locking on those planes. We do not like your leader, so we bomb you. What will ordinary Serbs say when the Yanks and their friends march in as part of our make-peace-or-we'll-kill-you policy?
I am not saying that we are wrong in all or any of these situations -- although it should be noted that the U.S. system of military justice has not seemed capable of finding anybody guilty of anything in recent incidents, such as the accidental shooting down of an Iranian airliner and our own helicopters in Iraq.
We are throwing our weight around these days because we have the power, and the ignorance, to do it. But we should not kid our sanctimonious selves that our illusions make what we do right or sensible.
Richard Reeves is a syndicated columnist.
Pub Date: 3/15/99