We were once ugly Americans

In the '60s and '70s all across Europe, American largesse and bravado, borne of the success of WWII, coupled with a deserved prosperity but sometimes paraded ostentatiously, gave us a derisive nickname; Ugly American. What many saw as showing off with our ability to have jet travel to tour Europe, camera dangling from neck straps, dollars and travelers’ checks aplenty, incapability to speak foreign languages yet raising our voices while issuing loud requests to bemused foreigners… it was perhaps a time of innocence and, yes definitely, a cultural mistake. It is, however, a time Europe now misses. Gone are trustworthy but awkward Americans, replaced by untrustworthy partners, out-of-control ultra-right-wing politics, and frightening prospects for world peace.

All across Europe and NATO as well as much of Asia and Africa, our previous staunch allies and friends are looking at a future where America and Americans may no longer be relied on, where American capability and morality that once supported values in common have vanished. Under this Administration such commonality has been destroyed. Not dented, not frayed, as many in the media would desperately wish to think, but destroyed. Ursula von der Leyen, EU Chief, has urgently claimed that Europe must now hold fast to a “rules-based order” to countermine America’s new deviation from international law, “…for a world that has gone and will not return.”

Headlines in American professional industrial publications also lament the changes; “Switzerland eyes European Air Defenses, Settles for Fewer F-35s.” The new American political elite have made decisions that work to quickly destroy any concept of a rules-based-order partnership in defense. And American industry defense giants are quietly expressing grave concern over their future foreign order books’ thin prospects. Raytheon was dismayed when they learned that they are no longer allowed to sell or ship support for Patriot surface-to-air defense systems to most existing European or Asian ally. Most of Raytheon’s overseas clients need to begin switching purchasing power to local or friendly industries. These are multi-decade commitments for billions of dollars for American industry, wiped out in an instant by the current US policy and have caused multi-decade industrial strengthening of European and Chinese industries. Yes, Chinese and, in the case of some African and Asian countries, perhaps Russian as well.

Capricious DC decisions and sayings may seem comical until they manifest as part of a plan of discord, distractions, and a re-ordering of global power based on false premises of permanent superiority. There is no such thing as permanent superiority. 350,000,000 Americans, even if all of them agreed (which we do not!), cannot overwhelm 7,880,000,000 people without a resultant conflict. All the offensive weapons and know-how in America cannot overwhelm the same capabilities and will of the rest of the world. Initially it may look like toppling or killing a few leaders of adversarial countries is winning a war, but that is childish thinking. Success can only be measured over time and, as proving with Iran, 92,000,000 Iranians may not simply roll over when brutally attacked. Britain’s population of only 41,000,000 wasn’t in 1939/40 — perhaps that’s a lesson better re-learned.

The danger here is that where we were once “ugly Americans,” but we have now become un-friendly, untrustworthy Americans – and that may take decades to remedy.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.