A world of ignorance
23 October 2010
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America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that
The past year, however, has demonstrated that Kennan was wrong. Despite America’s apparent openness, other countries’ officials are just as inept in understanding the United States. The exposed Russian spy ring, for example, revealed some magical thinking on the part of Russia’s intelligence services. These agents were given deep cover assignments in the United States — in some cases for more than a decade. According to US federal prosecutors, the spies were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, CIA leadership, and congressional politics. Based on the indictment, however, it appears that the Russian spies gathered nothing from the decade-long enterprise that a well-trained analyst couldn’t have picked up by trolling the internet. The problem is that Russia’s intelligence services believed that a secret cabal runs American foreign policy.
Similarly, the current Iranian leadership seems to have very little understanding of how the American government works. Hossein Shariatmadari, a key adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recently told a reporter for the New Yorker that the green movement was a US-led conspiracy organised by, among others, the neoconservative think-tanker Michael Ledeen, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the billionaire George Soros. These three individuals agree on very little. They are more likely to form a new hip-hop group than successfully organise the Iranian reform movement. American pundits and policymakers have not read the tea leaves in Iran all that well, but Iranian analysts are just as deficient in their analysis of the United States.
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Landon Wilson
October 23rd, 2010 6:33pm Report this commentMr. Drezner,
I have been reading your papers at Foreign Policy since you began writing for the magazine. Maybe it's because I'm of a younger generation, twenty-two years old to be exact, but the points you make in this paper are so obvious to me that the paper itself shouldn't "have" to be written. The fact that this nation and it's leaders are so blindly ethnocentric is truly disturbing, and now my generation is left with the task of cleaning up this mess. We have been so foolish, and I hope my age group learns from the mistakes of our parents. If not...well...we're screwed. Keep up the amazing work you do.
John Thoma
October 24th, 2010 4:27pm Report this commentDr. Drezner -- do you know how high China's tariffs are? Would you consider criticizing Chinese protectionism in one of your articles? In case you didn't know about this somewhat obscure country's tariff policies, you can consult: WTO Tariff Profiles 2009, which can be downloaded for free!
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