Clive Davis

WELCOME MAT

A US reader takes exception to that survey on the unfriendly reception visitors receive at American airports:

It sounds from your article like good old Yank-bashing to this cosmopolitan Yank.  Considering the millions of people who are allowed to walk into America with no visa, no passport, no address, no follow-up and no consequences, are we really supposed to get riled about surly bureaucrats?

That question answers itself, doesn't it? If the system can't track illegals, what can be gained from anatagonizing the millions of bona fide business travellers and holidaymakers? Andrew Sullivan has more on this problem. And here's Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph:

I've never expected officials to welcome me with balloons and banners, but I hope this causes them to be a bit nicer – it's never good after a 10-hour flight, and having had to fill out that ridiculous visa waiver form ("Are you a terrorist? A drug smuggler?" "Yes, YES I AM!"), to then have to deal with a smug man dressed as a member of the Village People for half an hour.

BTW, this goes back beyond the Bush era. I had my share of stressful encounters in the 80s and 90s. And I have to say that the French can't be far behind in the unpleasantness stakes. There was a time when I couldn't get through Charles de Gaulle airport without being searched. My fault for looking like an Arab, I suppose.

PORT OF ENTRY

All those scowling faces aren't doing much to help America's image:

US immigration and customs officials are viewed as "arrogant, rude and unpredictable" by foreign business travellers in a survey... a Focusing on the type of respondent most likely to hold favourable view of the US, it found that two-thirds... thought the US "the worst country in the world" in the way it treated foreign visitors at the border...

Earlier this year, Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, and Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary, promised to tackle these concerns and improve the visa process, which in many countries can take months and cost hundreds of dollars. But last month Jean-Claude Baumgarten, president of the World Travel and Tourism Council, told the Financial Times that none of the promised measures had so far been introduced.

Note that we're not talking about surly, dope-smoking backpackers. It's the same old story, unfortunately. Public diplomacy always comes bottom of the list of priorities.

TRANSATLANTIC

BritainAndAmerica.com,  a new website devoted to generating conversation across the pond. I wish it well, though I hope they've got a good team of bouncers supervising the comments section - things will probably get quite heated there before too long.  Sadly, there's not much mutual understanding in the air at the moment. [Via Iain Dale.]

WHAT'S FRENCH FOR "THE FIRE NEXT TIME"?

The ever-readable Rod Dreher has punted a question my way about the pessimistic view of Europe's future contained in a Brussels Journal interview with the German writer, Henryk Broder:

He urged young people to get out and "move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable."

Now, I don't know Broder's work at all, so I can't comment on his experiences or expertise. But I have major problems with websites that continually use headlines such as "The Rape of Europe". Somehow, that starts bells ringing, much like the sight of a Confederate flag in my rear-view mirror.

All I can say to Rod is that I agree that Europe faces major challenges over assimilation, and that we've been lax about Islamist extremists. No question about it. What I don't care for is the way that certain American conservatives  - Rod isn't one of them - are so eager to forecast an imminent apocalypse. (Is all this supposed to be compensation for the fiasco in Baghdad? I wonder sometimes.) There's a big market for Euro-meltdown books but, as I've noted before, the doom-mongers have a habit of drawing the worst possible conclusions. Here's NRO's Stanley Kurtz again:

Islamic militias tear capital apart. Country may soon be divided....No, not Iraq. I’m talking about France. Europe continues its descent into...what shall we call it? Civil war? Intifada? Call it what you like, but take it deadly seriously.

And then there's Mark Steyn's prognosis:

It’s very hard to persuade the British just how fast things are moving. But I wouldn’t mind betting I’ll be sponsoring... my various relatives all over Europe for U.S. immigration before 2015, 2020 or so.

I don't pretend to be an authority on French politics, and I have no idea whether riots will break out again this autumn. But I recommend this Brookings discussion featuring Christopher Caldwell, who happens to be a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, and so couldn't be dismissed as a soggy liberal. If you read his comments in the full transcript, it’s obvious that Caldwell isn’t starry-eyed about French society or the demographic question. But it seems to me he’s a long way from declaring martial law. Or, if you don't have the time to wade through all that, read the op-ed by Matthew Kaminski, Paris-based editor at that well-known pinko rag, the Wall Street Journal. Again, he points up the fractured nature of French society and of Europe. Yet he sees the nuances too.

The French approach to assimilation, with its insistence on strict secularism and its dirigiste firmness, does not make for an American-style melting pot. But it may well carve a better path to civil peace, over time, than could undertake a major economic reform. Remarkably little has been done, even in the year since the riots, to loosen up the restrictive labor codes that do so much to keep poor immigrants--not least poor Muslim immigrants--from finding work and integrating themselves into French life.

The Times’s Paris correspondent, Charles Bremner takes a similar stance [Via Comment Central]:

The local authorities also feel let down. Claude Dilain, the long-serving Socialist mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, has struggled to improve conditions over the past year and he has even written a book on his pride in his town. He blames the state for failing to deliver promised funds. "People here feel that they are on the edge of the Republic," said last week. "After the emotion passed last year, the political debate shifted away from the banlieues.... All the conditions are there for it to blow up. If people feel nothing has changed, we cannot tell them that they are wrong.

The last point I'd make to Rod is that the jeering, Europe-is-for-wimps tone of the Mark Steyn school of journalism is about as irritating as the Americans-are-all-lardbutts drivel that comes from the other side of the divide. (Hurricane Katrina gave that phenomenon a new lease of life, you may recall). Rod writes eloquently about how the insufferable arrogance of the GOP machine has turned him off party politics. All I'd ask him to consider is how, just at this moment, things look to pro-American types like me who are listening in from a few thousand miles away. After all, even a hyper-power needs a few friends.

NEMESIS

"Iraq today is as far-removed from a peaceful settlement as it was in the spring of 2003…" Given that Con Coughlin was an unabashed supporter of going to war against Saddam, his essay in today’s Telegraph makes all the more painful reading. As for the consequences for the Anglo-American partnership, well...

A former high-ranking British intelligence officer who was also involved in the planning for post-war Iraq was even more critical of Washington's attitude. "We were completely and utterly stuffed by the Americans. We should never trust them again, or at least until we see a change of attitude from the Bush administration. Forget what they say, it's what they do. They simply didn't take any notice of any of the advice we gave them. They just did what suited them.

And this assertion is sure to stir all sorts of responses:

One of the more unpalatable characteristics of the neo-cons, many of whom have close associations with the hard Right in Israel, was their disregard for the wishes of the Iraqi people. Their principal Iraqi contact before the war was Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled politician who had fled the country as a child in the 1950s and was unknown inside Iraq. Chalabi had seduced his neo-con admirers with the promise that, under his leadership, Iraq would establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a far-fetched proposition given Iraq's long-standing role as the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism.

KAGAN'S VISION

Time to convene another meeting of the Robert Kagan fan club. I can't wait to read his new polemic. Oxblog's David Adesnik has been getting a preview:

I believe this will be the book that establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kagan is the kind of original thinker who transcends partisan or ideological labels. I believe that "Dangerous Nation" will be the kind of book that liberals don't just read because they want to know what conservatives are thinking, but because it is a book that can educate any reader, political disagreements aside.

At a moment when "neo-conservative" has become something of a slur on both sides of the aisle, it is especially fitting for a book to come out that demonstrates not just how powerful neo-conservative thinking can be, but also how subtle -- or dare I say "nuanced"?

The neo-con cause certainly needs bolstering at the moment. BTW, Kagan also gets a brief endorsement from Times columnist Gerard Baker.

SEPARATE LIVES

A reader in Texas replies to that complaint about America's reluctance to engage with the rest of us:

I read your blog every day. I really enjoy it. That being said, however, I think this idea you have about a "dialogue" across the Atlantic is not going to go too far.

Now, I say this as someone who has lived in Germany a few different times, also lived in Asia and lived in many different areas of the States. Most Americans are not too concerned with the wider world for two reasons. One, it's pretty far away and two, we tend to be pragmatic individuals. Our basic sense of the world is: we all manage to get along, why can't you? We don't like to see people being oppressed. However, we have a great distrust, in some ways a great dislike, for "European Ideas'. I put that in quotes and capitals to show you how it often comes across to us. Honestly, we don't see why we should emulate many of the things that are done in Europe. Your policies often don't work and very often are against the fabric of our culture. We are not Europeans and our culture is very different from yours.

It's also the way it comes across, like a stuck-up professor who is sooo much more intelligent than us hicks. Do we have problems? Sure, we're the first to admit it, but we're working on them. Please! We see a lot of bias and blatant anti-semitism coming across the Atlantic and it's finding a home in the Left here.

I don't think that's the kind of dialogue you were talking about, but that's what most of us see. When Europe can get honest about itself, the Middle East, the UN and us, come back and we can talk. Right now it seems more like Europe wants to do the talking and wants us to listen in silence to "our betters". This is especially true when we read articles written in the newspapers. It's obvious most of these writers have no clue to life in America, much less any understanding of us. Of course, you don't read too many articles in the States about how horrible Europe is. We would just rather get on with our lives. Now, this is from a middle class American, with no ties to any political party or the "elite" ruling class. I think my views are fairly common, however, for what it's worth!

Considering how much moronic anti-Americanism we produce in Europe, I don't blame her for washing her hands of us. That said, I still think she's mistaken. All I'll add is that 90 per cent of the e-mails I've had from the US over the last year have taken the same line.

THE OCEAN GROWS EVEN WIDER?

More on the great American-European divide, this time from Time magazine's Jeff McAllister. Some key points:

...I have been writing about U.S. foreign policy for 30 years and living in Europe for the last seven... I fear there are bigger centrifugal trends at work than a single President and his unpopular war....

...In the Czech Republic, for example, 83% of those polled in July don't want to let the U.S. build a military base there. The Transatlantic Trends survey shows the sharpest drop in support for U.S. leadership in countries that have traditionally been most pro-American, such as the U.K. and Poland.

...Not worrying about what others think speaks to a splendid isolationism of the mind. Even if Europe doesn't have the heft it used to, the U.S. will find managing the rise of Asia's new powers much harder without help from the bulk of the most prosperous democracies.

[Via Atlantic Review]

MISTAKES

Norm has written a candid post on why he's changed his mind about the invasion of Iraq:

   I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a "cakewalk", I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.

I feel much the same way. Would I see things differently if the chemical and bio stockpiles - which I was confident did exist - had turned up? Possibly. But that's more than hypothetical. As for the consequences for the transatlantic alliance, William Rees-Mogg's assessment could hardly be gloomier:

Just as General Dannatt has cautioned that the Army could be broken in Iraq, so we must face the danger that the alliance could be broken. The Bush Administration has treated the US-UK alliance with supercilious negligence, if not with outright arrogance. As a result, the United States is more unpopular in Britain than at any time in my life. This needs to be put right, and it can be put right only by frank consultation.

But is anyone in Washington - on either side of the aisle - really paying any attention? I have my doubts.

THE AMERICAN PROBLEM

One thing that maddens me whenever I talk to US conservatives (most of them, anyway) is their sense that America's mission is so self-evidently virtuous that there's no need to try to engage with non-believers in, say, decrepit, decadent Europe. I assume that attitude goes a long way to explaining why the PR effort has been so half-hearted.

David Rief gets to the heart of the matter in a must-read letter to Belgravia Dispatch:

You write, correctly, in my view of the current administration's "bloated sense of American exceptionalism." But I think it is American exceptionalism itself, as our official national ideology, that is now dangerous to our national interest in a way it has not been in the past. The reason for this is simple. During much of the 20th century, much of the world (outside of Latin America, that is, where we were always viewed as the empire) concurred with America's image of itself.

Perhaps that was because of what we represented; perhaps, to take the realist approach you and I both favour, it was because it was in Europe's and much of East Asia's interest to do so. But at the very least, the sense we had of ourselves did not seem illegitimate to much of the world as it does now. But now is now, and we are still proceeding as if we get a kind of moral free pass no matter what we do, that we are exceptional.

Well said. I wish I didn't agree with him, but he's right.