Hanson-This May Be His Best Ever

[Annie]

A Return to Childhood​

EXCERPT:

POOR US — WE ARE ALL ALONE?
It is disturbing to see John Kerry insist that America has lost its friends and, through imbecilic diplomacy or worse, alienated those abroad. The world I see would beg to differ. Emigrants strive to reach American shores more often than all other destinations combined. Globalization is now synonymous with Americanization itself. The world's preference for American food, music, travel, popular culture, fashion, and entertainment all suggest a dynamism in the United States found nowhere else.

One third of the planet — India and China — has evolved from being impoverished and bitter neutrals or outright enemies into capitalist powerhouses dependent on American free trade and outsourced jobs. If we used to argue in the 1940s about whether millions of dollars in U.S. grain aid really did any good in feeding the starving of China and India, we can all agree now that American liberality in letting consumer goods in and jobs out has done more for the world's hungry millions than a century of American gift-giving.

Without $12 billion a year in remittances from illegal aliens in the United States and American tourists south of the border, the economy of Mexico would be in ruins. For all his party's juvenile rhetoric, Vicente Fox realizes that America is about as liberal and humane to Mexicans who head north as his country is harsh and cruel to Latin Americans who cross its own borders from the south.

European elites, it is true, are angry at the United States. But that pique is more a result of projection and scapegoating rising from its own problems, not ours — as it struggles with demographic crises, unassimilated immigrants, impotence abroad, an embarrassing desire for free American protection despite concomitant resentment and envy, and a growing realization that while the world talks up the EU, when it has real problems, it goes to Washington.

In this regard, Greece is a metaphor for the entire ambivalence of the continent. It now worries about Arab terrorists in Athens, despite courting Middle East dictators for decades. It castigates the U.S. for bothering an Islamic Iraq, but Greeks lauded Milosevic in support of his Orthodox crusade against Albanian and Kosovar Muslims. A few years ago we were booed by Athenians for trying to save Muslims in the Balkans, and now we are even more vehemently trashed for allegedly killing them. Thousands publicly hissed at the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; yet American sailors openly patrol the Greek coastline while Special Forces not so openly help train Olympic security officers. Add it all up and there is one constant: Greece (like Europe) really does count on the U.S. as much as it counts on never having to say that publicly.