Lonely Superpower: Europeans and Arabs Advise the US How to Change the Image - 11 January, 2003

So far the US is governed by a cowboy with a charged gun, Germans suppose.

The issue of bettering the US image in Europeans and Americans’ opinion seems to become one of the basic for the US administration. Though we should give Americans their due: they consult about this not only with themselves. This week an authoritative group of foreign journalists secretly told to US Council on International Relations how the US is considered by Europeans and Arabs.
 
So, they consider the US not in the way Americans themselves would prefer they do. “Whatever the US would do, it will be anyway criticized by Europeans,” Ruediger Lenz, manager general of German Television said, broadcasting to the US. According to Lenz, there is some degree of distrust to Americans in Europe. While this distrust is being exploited by governments of different countries.

In Germany, Lenz says, many people consider the US to be a state which acts only in its own interests, while President Bush is a kind of cowboy with a charged gun. According to UPI, Lenz emphasizes, ties between the US and Germany based upon common values, which caused the NATO creation, have been already “wore out.” Nevertheless, Ruediger Lenz believes there are more things uniting Germans and Americans, than that ones separating them.

One more participant of this discussion, Andrew Kochut supposes the situation in the world has changed. The Soviet Union, the former common enemy of both, Germany and the US, united them much more powerfully than the today’s enemy, terrorism does. Some people explain it in a simple way: Al-Qaida is smart enough, so it does not attacks targets in Europe, Martin Walker from UPI notes.

Some polls carried out recently show Europeans admit the US is first in the sphere of high technologies, pop-music, television, cinema. Though for Europeans, the US influence in the world is too big. The US is often called now a “lonely superpower.” And it will be not easy for the US to achieve another image in the world opinion. It hardly can happen during one night, Khafez Al-Mirazi, head of Washington bureau of the Al Jazeera television company says. According to him, if Condy Rice gives in interview to Al Jazeera, this does not mean all Arabs will wave US flags next day.

The independent Council on International Relations was created in the US 1921. This is the Council which issues a powerful magazine, Foreign Affairs and produces recommendations on the US foreign policy. Ironically, the Council has not stopped its work in the new millenium, however the US is now the only superpower of the world. Just opposite, the advisers on international policy have even more work to do now. The reason is probably not that the US is the only superpower, but that it is a lonely superpower.
 
Sergei Borisov
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Vera Solovieva