A world of ignorance

America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that

Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies that demonstrate a breathtaking ability to think that other countries were just like the United States. During the Cold War, US policymakers continually misread the Pacific Rim. In the 1940s, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska vowed that ‘with God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City’. It turned out that the communists were more successful in that endeavour than Chiang Kai-Shek.

Lack of local knowledge has hampered America in the Middle East over the past decade. US policymakers were convinced prior to the second Gulf war that Ahmed Chalabi would be welcomed by Iraqis as their Thomas Jefferson. The entire ‘axis of evil’ speech posited that Iran and Iraq were acting in concert, despite their decade-long war in the 1980s. The Iraq Study Group found that, of the thousand employees at the US embassy in Iraq, six spoke Arabic. And this kind of ignorance was not limited to the Bush administration; it is shot through America’s foreign policy community.

Since the days of George Kennan, Americans have fretted over the apparent asymmetry between the US and its rivals. Their argument is simple: the United States is an open society, which allows foreigners to see much of what remains opaque in the rest of the world. Anyone who has a decent command of the English language and an internet connection can access reams of useful information about American grand strategy and foreign policy. The same cannot be said of Russia, China or Iran, much less the hermit kingdoms of North Korea or Myanmar.