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LOS ANGELES -- Has America gotten Australia into deep trouble in
Asia because of Iraq?
Australia, a sprawling continental nation of only 20 million people,
has had an image problem in Asia for decades. Asians feel it isn’t
a true Asian nation, and until recently, perhaps, many Australians
probably agreed.
But the dispatch of a couple of thousand Aussie troops to Iraq
to help President George W. Bush appear more multilateral snapped
much of Asia to renewed anti-Australian attention. A top Malaysian
official has even implied that the former British colony’s
lock-step with the Brits and Yanks unveiled a genetic anti-Muslimism.
Image can be everything when reality sometimes isn’t. So
argues former Australian diplomat Alison Broinowski, now at Australian
National University, in a new essay just published in the current
The Sydney Papers, a superb political quarterly. Her country’s
image in Asia, she says, is that of arrogance and bongkak (a Malay
word for too big for one’s boots). True, Australia is mainly
white, Western and Christian, but in recent years, it has opened
up its doors to outsiders as never before. And in 1999, invited
by Indonesia, Australia intervened to reduce bloodshed in East
Timor. That effort undoubtedly saved many Asian lives.
Whatever the good intentions of that intervention concludes Broinowski,
Iraq was a different kettle of fish: Meekly following Uncle Sam
into that controversy was to make Australia ‘‘more
isolated and exposed to punishment as a scapegoat for the United
States than it was at Bali.’’
Not-always-sincere Asian leaders, reminding constituencies of the
historically Christian culture’s past contempt for Asia,
claim that decision revealed the country’s true colors. Thus
has Australia developed a new image problem. While its policies
are obviously not intended, much less designed, to be anti-Islam
or anti-Asia, many too-easily-offended Asians perceive them as
white-man’s-burden resurrected.
Broinowski’s recommendations, though, have less to do with
image than policy. Australia has to change its ‘‘recent
behavior as a culturally cringing, subservient ally of an imperious
United States,’’ which ‘‘not only undermines
our national interests and further damages our reputation in the
Asian region, but makes all of us targets, wherever we are.’’
She’s probably right, but such a U-turn is extremely unlikely
under the John Howard government and would profoundly shake the
Bush administration, which is well aware of its own image problem
in the Muslim world. A new report issued last week in Washington
reaches a parallel conclusion about the decline in America’s
worldwide approval rating.
What’s the problem? As the U.S. Advisory Group on Public
Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World would have it, the U.S.
image is tattered largely because of inept articulation and under-funding
of public diplomacy (i.e., propaganda). The panel lamented ‘a
process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of
advocacy over the last decade.’’
But can piling on the words and the money ameliorate the problem?
It’s true that the fall of the former Soviet Union, the last
major worldwide threat, knocked the stuffing out of the U.S. propaganda
budget, leaving us, according to the advisory group, bankrupt to
face down radical Islam’s unwarranted indictment of the West.
And so the report’s panel of distinguished citizens proposes
the creation of a White House director of public diplomacy with
new funding to help explain America to the world.
This recommendation, drearily predictable, of course, will probably
not fall on deaf ears in today’s understandably worried Washington.
Even so, they are absurd. America has an image problem in Asia
not because the world hasn’t heard our message, but because
we haven’t been listening to theirs.
We too often have national attention deficit disorder: We mostly
talk, they mostly listen; we learn little, they go away convinced
our minds are made up. The result at this end is ignorance, inconsistency
and
self-righteousness. The result in the rest of the world is paranoia
about our real intentions and festering anti-Americanism.
The last thing America needs is another bureaucratic superman deal a
White House world-propaganda czar? Why not go the whole route they
will say in Asia and elsewhere -- and build yourself an Orwellian
Ministry of Disinformation?
If anyone is going to listen to our story, it has to come from
the White House, from the one with the policy power, the president
himself. The image-problem buck stops there.
And it begins with policy: The American proclivity to deploying
its brave armed forces to crises for which military solutions have
only temporary effect plays into the hands of Muslim radicals and
radicalizes moderates and progressives. America’s highfaluting
image problem, even more than Australia’s, is that these
days it is too often based on reality.
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The above weekly column has just appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser,
The South China Morning Post and The Straits Times of Singapore.
The author, Tom Plate, is a regular columnist at these
three papers. The column also appears in other world newspapers,
including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times,
The Japan Times and The Korea Times. Email him at: tplate@ucla.edu.
For publication
and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson
(john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate
International. |
