Christopher Dickey: Americans Grow Apathetic Over Foreign Policy
[Christopher Dickey currently serves as Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor.]
Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget China. Forget Latin America. Russia is an old memory and Europe a fading idea....
Americans have been in this sort of apathetic but emotional mood many times before, and the record is grim. After World War I, the United States turned away from the League of Nations and back in on itself, only to watch from an unsafe distance the resurrection of Germany under the Nazis. After the Cold War evanesced, the Gulf War was won, and history, it seemed, had ended in the early 1990s, Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency with the axiom “It’s the economy, stupid.”...
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Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget China. Forget Latin America. Russia is an old memory and Europe a fading idea....
Americans have been in this sort of apathetic but emotional mood many times before, and the record is grim. After World War I, the United States turned away from the League of Nations and back in on itself, only to watch from an unsafe distance the resurrection of Germany under the Nazis. After the Cold War evanesced, the Gulf War was won, and history, it seemed, had ended in the early 1990s, Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency with the axiom “It’s the economy, stupid.”...