Ezra Klein quotes Rick Perlstein on the visit of another big bad who actually has more control of his country than Ahmadinejad as.
[W]hat is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.
Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.)...
[S]poke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys")...
Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Ezra goes on to speculate about why the approach for much of the country is to freak the hell out. Read his theory and mine... after the cut.
Ezra's explanation:
And it's worth saying that the Soviet Union really was murderously evil. It didn't merely deny the existence of massacres, but did its level best to perpetrate a couple. It didn't merely say threatening things about America, but actually possessed the weaponry to destroy us thousands of times over. And we may have been scared. But we didn't run, and we didn't back down from the challenge.
I don't know how to prove this, but my sense is that the dawning realization that we're globally unpopular is having profound effects on the American psyche... Is the reason we fear to negotiate with Iran because we believe that, when it comes down to it and we ask for an end to their nuclear program, they'll refuse, and the world will agree with them and not us? Is America growing afraid of rejection?
I don't think so. I"m not sure the conservatives who scream loudest about this kind of thing are actually thinking much about our popularity abroad. I think instead its a more primal fear. Even with Ballistic Missiles and Pearl Harbor I think there was still a feeling that America was set off from the violence of the rest of the world. Sure they could hit us in theory, but it hadn't really happened even as we fought wars abroad.
That obviously changed with 9/11. Since then I think many people see militant Islam as kryptonite to America and Europe. Suddenly people are inexplicably longing for the 'simpler' days of the Cold War. Moreover, now we need to be afraid all the time and so a buffoon like Ahmadinejad who doesn't even run his own country is frightening. We have to blow militants up over there so they can't exploit our weaknesses over here. That's my best guess at the mindset behind freaking out.
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