That is pure paranoidal fantasy.

The most potent and convincing critique of American policy comes from Americans - as you can easily confirm from reading around American blogs and journalism.

For example, on the cost of the Iraq war, just in the news:

‘According to economics professor William Nordhaus of Yale University, these costs are: “a significant burden on the federal budget, another straw on the camel’s back.

“The major problem is the Bush administration’s unwillingness to face up to the need to finance any of the additional costs, whether the war in Iraq, homeland security, or most important of all the new Medicare provisions,” he says.

“Like a teenager who gets further in debt on a credit card, the Bush administration is racking up costs that will have to be paid in the future in higher taxes or lower government programs.

“The fiscal irresponsibility is really awesome.”

- from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3603923.stm

The currently most extensive exposition and defence of the welfare state in European countries comes from an American academic, Peter Lindert of the University of California, Davis, author of: Growing Public Social Spending Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2004), the subject of the economic focus article in last Saturday’s The Economist, which I mentioned earlier.

Right. So, would you say that the current chaos in Iraq wouldn’t look a bit better, or would less frequently be used (whether fairly or unfairly) against the US alone, if it was achieved under UN or NATO supervision?

If the United States, as a power, decides to consistently act unilaterally, it will firstly find that transaction costs will be increased. Imagine if the WTO and GATT is gone, and international trade is conducted mainly through bilateral ties, mainly between blocs. Would American trade be helped that way?

Regardless, if the United States is seen as a destabilizing force sooner or later it will provoke coalitions aimed at restraining its ability to act outside normal bounds. If its leadership wants a hostile world, fine; the same leadership just shouldn’t expect the rest of the world to go along with the United States.

That would be a pity. Unlike many Americans currently in power, it seems, I don’t hate the US, and I certainly don’t want the world to hate it.

As to the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was finally brought on by Reagan’s quite unilateral deficit spending, which essentially bankrupted Russia.

I’m going to ask for cites, here. Web or dead-tree will work equally well.

In the end, communism was done in by capitalism simply because capitalism could always borrow money from capital markets - an impossibility for a command economy.

Ah, so Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia never borrowed money from Western banks after all.

a concerted anti-American campaign in European academia and mass media

Throughout your posting history, you’ve systematically conflated fair criticism with unfair criticism, natural resentment of what the consequences of what the US does with a resentment based on unchanging hatred. It would be too much to expect you to try to look at realities, I suppose.

“If criticism, fair or unfair, of the United States becomes a constant, then the transaction costs for US public and private actors will rise considerably, putting it at the disadvantage of countries and individuals lacking its problems.”

Again, the transaction costs are also reduced for the US by the fact that unilateralism, in effect, is cheaper, while multilateralism (Kyoto, the UN, NATO) has only been a disproportionately unfair financial and political burden on the US.

James:

It’s tiresome to hear of the GOP branded as an agent for monolithic “Sovietization” - and I’m a Democrat myself. It’s also inaccurate to describe mass media in the US being in control of such agents, as the media in the US is largely composed of talent and authors usually veering left-of-center.

As to the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was finally brought on by Reagan’s quite unilateral deficit spending, which essentially bankrupted Russia. Andropov, in his brief tenure as party chairman, saw the writing on the wall, and pushed for a younger generation of leaders, such as Gorbachev, when it became clear that the US was simply going to outspend the Soviets in missiles and arms. In the end, communism was done in by capitalism simply because capitalism could always borrow money from capital markets - an impossibility for a command economy.

But you are right that consumer interests come first, and will determine choice. Develop that line a little further, however, and you’ll see that the tendency in itself is a reason “oligarchies”, as you put it, are vulnerable. Public anger at overreaching corporations is a viable force which tempers a lot of corporate conduct. Yet we are all shareholders, one way or another, in the fortunes of these corporations, so it is quite counterproductive to create environments that are detrimental to their functioning.

Debating corporate governance is as important as debating state governance.

What you’ve skirted, though, is the issue of why there is a concerted anti-American campaign in European academia and mass media, which actually pre-dates 9/11, and the Bush administration. And the answer lies in the dependent-status of welfare states on the American economic juggernaut, which continues to irritate Europe, and fuels anti-American bigotry to such an extent that even people like Bob cannot step outside of the stream, and see its existence.

I’m sure that is true and don’t detect any wave of xenophobia in Europe directed towards Americans. The instinctive reaction to 9-11 was one of horror followed by sympathy, certainly among Londoners who had experience of the bombing in WW2, as news reports bear out: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3080846/

The reflective among Europeans recognise that supporters of the Bush administration in America have a powerful vested interest in an election year in painting any criticism of the administration by non-Americans as xenophobic to discredit it - the familiar “label and smear” technique so often applied by the Soviets.

Europeans really aren’t that dumb. Many of us here follow the international news and we read reports on the web. We know that many Americans are hugely critical of the Bush administration, including members of Congress, and it’s not difficult to find links to substantiate that.

Calling European critics of the Bush administration “Commies” or welfare junkies just verges on the sad. We had a thread a while back on welfare systems and could doubtless start another - a good starting point would be “Taxing the poor to pay the poor” in last Saturday’s The Economist (subscription only) - but that is not the main issue here.

Btw I lived through WW2 in inner London dodging bombs. A vivid personal memory is being awaken early by my father on the morning of 6 June 1944 at about 6 o/c to watch the war planes - bombers, fighters, transports and gliders - flying low over south London on their way to the Normandy beaches. Of course, we didn’t know their destination for sure at the time but it was certain the long expected invasion had started. Perhaps readers will therefore understand if I don’t take it too kindly to be told that I lack the whatever to withstand terrorist threats - especially when in the weeks following D-Day, a V1 flying bomb, the precusor of cruise missiles, landed down one end of the road where I lived then, and later a V2 ballistic rocket landed at the other.

RSN’s dismissal of world opinion overlooks a few crucial points: one is, the importance of magnitude, and two, diffusion of interests among elites. A common problem is that a lot of people here (in the USA) tend to brush off the matter by saying “they hate us anyway” in reference to the Middle East, Latin America, and so on. Folks, most of the time this ain’t so. Most people don’t spend that much time fulminating with wrath towards anybody–no foolin’.

Second, in a developed nation, bigotry towards a foreign country normally takes a back seat to consumer preference. Speaking as yet another Yank, I get furious when companies use their monopoly power to screw me over, and to my inexpressible surprise, it turns out Europeans are the same way. Neither the EU nor the US are really market economies at all–most sectors are dominated by oligopolies, and until that is remedied, the consumers of any country will be at odds with their domestic producers. Similarly, heads of state and ruling parties lose opportunies if their people conceive a passionate animosity for another country.

But in a predicament where elites in business or government are the affronted ones–that is new, and that is different. So Mario Monti nixed the GE-Honeywell merger and it annoyed Jack Welch–we at United Airlines practically built a shrine to St Mario. We were thrilled that our supply of parts wasn’t going to come from a monopoly. Similarly, while some US legislators might have been annoyed by an EU suit in the WTO, in some cases it might actually be welcomed if the region is disproportionately affected by Washington trade policies. That’s how things normally operate in the civilized world, and as a long-time avid reader of business magazines, I can assure you it’s vital to the sort of orderly international relations in which America thrives.

It is this sort of diffusion of interests–European airlines who root for Boeing and American insurance carriers who root for Munich Re.–that gets shot to hell by “unilateralism.” In my gloomy opinion, the reason why this has failed to deter the Bush Administration and its boosters in business is that my country is becoming Sovietized. The GOP uses the NED/IRI to bypass campaign funding restrictions, large businesses own the media and own the GOP, and the GOP can control the legislative agenda no matter what the voters say–state, party and enterprise purr like three gears meshing along nicely.

Lubricated by this cool new xenophobia, of course.

For the record:

- I’ve not expressed any views as to what led to the eventual (welcome IMO) collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes in its satellites in Europe.

- There is no inconsistency between being pro-America, supportive of the NATO alliance and critical of the present Bush administration, as many Americans are. I’m indebted to Brad Delong for this following observation:

“George H.W. Bush had three main accomplishments as president to his credit: the first big steps to eliminate the Reagan budget deficits (through the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, tax increases, and discretionary spending caps), strong support for open-society reformers rather than authoritarians in Russia, and the construction of a broad U.S.-led coalition to enforce international law.

“George W. Bush has revived Reagan’s deficits, strongly supported Putin’s shift back toward a much more authoritarian politics in Russia, and broken George H.W. Bush’s coalition into shards.

“It’s hard for me at least not to see George W. Bush’s actions as, at some level, a message to his father: ‘See Dad? See? I’ve broken everything you built!’” - from: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000573.html

The only reason the Soviet Union could not act unilaterally was not because of world opinion, but because the US was a counterbalance, so they never had the freedom to act unilaterally.

Ah, but the USSR acted unilaterally within its sphere, and sometimes quite dramatically outside of its sphere despite the opposition of anti-Soviet powers–Cuba, Vietnam, and Ethiopia all come to mind.

That said, if the Soviet Union tried anything too destabilizing–invading Yugoslavia or Iran, say, or deploying missiles in Cuba–it was slapped down by a fairly broad global coalition.

There is really no counterbalance to the US now, other than world opinion. But if anti-American bigotry is a constant, then world opinion becomes irrelevant.

First point: “now” isn’t eternal, you know. As it is, the failure to establish a particularly secure coalition occupying Iraq has both undercut the operation’s legitimacy and jeopardized its long-term survival.

Second point: If criticism, fair or unfair, of the United States becomes a constant, then the transaction costs for US public and private actors will rise considerably, putting it at the disadvantage of countries and individuals lacking its problems.

As to the notion that European social welfare state are communist, no, I don’t think many Americans believe that. However, there is one good reason why successive American administrations have looked the other way when social democratic parties vied for power in western Europe during the Cold War: they were always seen as a bulkward against the various national communist parties, the lesser of two evils, essentially. In other words, they split the vote of the left. That was why American global strategists did not mind opening up US markets to European products, even though they were initially mostly subsidized by western European welfare states.

Anything to get Europe hooked to the good life. And it worked: even eastern Europe wound up longing for the lifestyle of the west.

But now that communism has collapsed, it behooves all of us to examine the economic underpinnings of social welfare states, and all the evidence seems to point out that, if cut off from America, they actually are quite unviable economic entities that are mired in constant stagnation and no-and-low growth, if not for the fact that their economies reap the benefits of trade with that free-market, capitalist powerhouse across the ocean.

Try as you might want to rationalize it, you still don’t have the demographics to achieve the necessary growth without addressing the issue of dismantling a significant portion of present-day welfare protections.

Ah well, it really doesn’t matter. Market forces have a way of righting what is wrong anyway. It will be a long and slow slide, and it will cause a lot of social pain. But we can all be sure of one thing: America will be made the scapegoat for all of Europe’s ills.

All the more reason for Americans not to take European opinion seriously, simply because Europe cannot be trusted to be unbiased.

This blogsite, of course, provides ample evidence of that.

Tx: “I have no answers”

Thanks for those insights from Madrid.

The starting point for solving the Iraq problem is for the Bush administration and the Neocons in America to acknowledge that they badly screwed up and that hopefully before too many more lives are lost.