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America’s New Nationalism
[America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven, Oxford University Press, 274 pages]

...For example: “trailing one’s coat.” Lieven resurrects this 18th-century phrase for provoking a quarrel by dragging one’s coat along a crowd so that another man will step on it. As he puts it, “American imperialists trail America’s coat over the whole world and rely on America to react with ‘don’t tread on me’ nationalist fury when the coat is trodden on.” The analogy explains something of the seeming paradox that while most Americans aren’t much interested in foreign interventions in the abstract, they always rally when the fighting starts. Opposed in principle to an imperialist policy, they end up supporting one.

Lieven admires the formal elements of the American Creed as stated in the Constitution and Declaration, stressing individual rights and liberties. But even the positive has its drawbacks. When a nation’s self-definition is grounded in the idea of democracy, potential enemies spring up everywhere—any country that does not share the creed is a candidate. American leaders who have fully internalized the creed are prone to conclude that those who oppose the United States must do so because of opposition to democracy itself, not for more banal or concrete reasons of state. Thus, wide swatches of the American establishment quickly convinced themselves that al-Qaeda initiated war on the United States because it “hated freedom” rather than because of opposition to American presence and policies in the Mideast.

Lieven views American nationalism as drawing sustenance from a pool of reactionary racial and ethnic resentments, and here his critique is conventionally liberal (and somewhat overstated). But he has novel and challenging observations to make as well. One is a link between America’s foreign policy and the new reign of political correctness, most pronounced on matters pertaining to race. He admires America’s transformation from a slave-holding country waging an expansionist war against Indian tribes to a nation upholding equal rights for all. But there might be a cost to the new anti-racist consciousness. He suggests an analogy in the Claymore mine. Shrapnel and explosives are packed in, the rear and sides blocked, so the explosion hurls the shrapnel out in one direction. Since proponents of any sentiment deemed racist now face social censure and often loss of employment in the United States, the only permissible focus for group hostility is outward. As Lieven puts it, “the suppression of feelings at home may have only increased the force with which they are directed at foreigners, who remain a legitimate and publicly accepted target of hatred.”

Lieven closes with a long and tightly argued chapter on America and the Israel-Palestine conflict—that realm where the distance between American attitudes and those of the rest of the world is greatest and poses the most peril for the United States. What has occurred, Lieven argues, is a sort of fusion of Israeli and American nationalisms so that American and Israeli actions in the Middle East are largely perceived as one. To some degree, that foreign perception is correct: Israeli and American attitudes have actually fused.

There are historical reasons for this development. America’s own Protestant past and a literalist reading of the Bible among many churches plays a role. So too does America’s early conception of itself as a New Israel. Add to that the American frontier narrative, so large a part of our national imagination. Our frontier is now closed and the Indians long since subjugated, but on the West Bank “civilized” Israeli settlers are carving out communities amidst natives who do not want them—or at least the story can be played that way. Add the institutional power of the Israel lobby, and the sum is something more than a relationship between a great power and a dependent ally.

One corollary of Israel’s becoming embedded in America’s own nationalist narrative is that many American intellectuals have adopted for themselves some of the more extreme ideas circulating in Israel—most dangerously the notion that the entire rest of the world is blindly, irrationally anti-Semitic and malevolent, so it is futile to listen to what other nations actually say.

Historical analogies to such a relationship between a major power and a client state are hard to come by. But Lieven suggests one: in 1914, Russia’s rulers, heavily influenced by the ideology of Pan-Slavism, gave Serbia a sort of blank check, a license to press irredentist claims against Austria it would never have dreamed of doing otherwise. The results were lamentable for all concerned. ...