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Olympics? Non! Trade? Non! Politics? Non!

 
Published July 30, 1996|Updated Sept. 16, 2005

The Ugly American has captured Europe's attention again this summer for trying to dictate who can trade with whom, dumping unfairly on U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and running a bumbling and sometimes unsportsmanlike Atlanta Olympics.

Some of this is exaggerated, but some hits home.

While there was a great outpouring of sympathy after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 and the bomb at the Olympics, the Atlanta bombing also added a few touches to an unflattering portrait.

To a country, Europe has joined Canada, Mexico and others in indignantly rejecting the attempt to penalize its businessmen for trading with Cuba, and now Libya and Iran.

This is mostly blamed on foreign policy lobbies trying to take advantage of the campaign for the American presidency to push their special interests.

Somehow others here don't think they need the U.S. Congress to make the laws telling them what to do and not to do. The 15-nation European Union is not much mollified by President Clinton putting off action until after the elections.

The attempt to control the trade of other countries could turn into the tit for tat of a trade war with America's closest friends if the next president and Congress try to make the penalties stick.

And it is likely to cause another argument with Europe at today's conference on terrorism here if the United States brings up Clinton's latest decision for sanctions against countries the United States suspects of harboring terrorists. Europe is bent on continuing its "critical dialogue" with Iran.

The campaign to dump Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general of the United Nations also comes under the heading of campaign politics, with Clinton seen as trying to head off conservative Republicans who have seized Boutros-Ghali as a scapegoat.

A fairer judgment is that the U.N. failures are really failures of the United States and others on the Security Council to live up to their own responsibilities. It was they who declared "safe areas" in Bosnia, Srebrenica among them, without providing the means to defend them.

The disaster for the United Nations in Somalia was, after all, under U.S. command. An American official has been put in charge of the U.N. reform the American critics are calling for.

James Rubin, the U.S. spokesman at the United Nations who is soon to be a Clinton campaign official, got more than he bargained for last week when he appeared to threaten a witch hunt for unnamed U.N. officials alleged to be campaigning for a Boutros-Ghali second term.

"It is our intention to look into how U.N. personnel are being used by the secretary-general for this purpose," he said.

He ran into Sylvana Foa, the U.N. spokeswoman, also an American, who replied that "Such bully tactics, threats and blatant attempts at intimidating staff members have a very disconcerting odor of the McCarthy era."

Guess who came across as the Ugly American.

Even before the bomb, Europeans joined in pointing out the initial shortcomings of the Atlanta Olympics, some already detailed by Americans themselves.

"Shame on Atlanta," headlined the conservative Paris newspaper Le Figaro and concluded:

"The prestige of the United States has been damaged. One expects a lot from the most powerful country on Earth. If it fails in something, it looks ridiculous. . . . The principle of confiding the Olympic Games to a private organization is also called into question. . . . Money can't buy everything."

Le Monde, France's leading newspaper, commented:

"The Olympic Games are only an occasion for loud self-satisfaction. . . . The litany (USA! USA!) began with the opening ceremony. After the (other) teams paraded by amid a scarcely polite indifference, the public went wild at the appearance of its own delegation. The only anthem sung was The Star Spangled Banner when normal protocol demanded that the Greek and Olympic hymns be heard. And since, it has been more of the same thing. Around the gymnastic apparatus, the wrestling pads, the swimming lanes, spectators alternate between indifference and hysteria. NBC, the official Olympic chain, which chooses the television images to show . . . shows only the American champions. We already knew that Atlanta had been negligent. We also discover that it is self-centered."

Much of the criticism centered on uncontrolled commercialization and the hype. Others contended that the partisan behavior of American spectators made it hard for others to compete.

After the bombing, the left-wing Liberation singled out for fault what it said was a lack of coordination and "the excessive role left to private enterprise in security matters (notably in airports)."

"Under the pressure of a terrorism with which it, like others, has to live with, America is ripe for an unprecedented debate on its dogmas of private enterprise," Liberation said.

And for Le Figaro again:

"The white militias, sometimes tinged with neo-Nazism, are contesting federal decisions, racial clashes are frequent, social links, frayed by poverty and criminality, are strained. . . . The American dream needs a new look."

Allowing for perhaps a trace of secret satisfaction that the United States isn't perfect either, all the above is an instructive picture of what others see as our warts.