What’s right about America

Bronwen Maddox is a tough-minded editor and reporter who prefers to do her own thinking, so she might not like to be told that she has written a terse book that is also boring and obvious. Yet I intend a compliment by this observation. The points she makes in defence of the US are as self-evident (and as important) as the dry, dull comment made by my old ex-Communist mate David Aaronovitch, when we once debated with the smug Americaphobes at some Parnassus or other.

"If there is going to be a superpower," said David to a storm of boos, "then I am glad it will be the US and not Russia or China." The best apercus are - don't you find? - very often the simplest ones.     

Many people find it somewhat easier to denounce Russian and Chinese arrogance now that Moscow and Beijing are the HQ of two capitalist empires, but for those (like myself) reared in the Vietnam epoch it has often been difficult to let go of the image of the hydra-headed Yanqui system that incinerated Indochina, destabilised Chile, backed Franco and invaded Lebanon and the Dominican Republic.

Maddox is from a later generation and to her it is more natural to identify Washington with the emancipation of eastern Europe, the spread of democratic and market-based institutions, the votes at the UN (and actions within Nato) to bring down Milosevic, isolate Mugabe, at least try a bit with Darfur, depose the Taliban and - here is where the rubber meets the road - finally enforce the thesaurus of UN resolutions in respect of Iraq.   

This book is a long way short of being an encomium. On a range of questions that stretch from Guantanamo to Kyoto to Abu Ghraib, Maddox is prepared essentially to split the difference and to say that America's critics are at least half-right. Her plea or brief is more concerned with the mens rea: she is generally ready to argue that American motives and intentions are fundamentally honorable.

I think she could sometimes have phrased this less apologetically. Discussing the Balkans she writes that "the US was accused of imperialism in leading the military action, and of refusing to get enough involved when it declined to put its troops on the ground."

That catches the spirit of European establishment anti-Americanism quite well, but fails to rub in the point that post-Berlin Wall Europe faced its first real challenge in Bosnia and Kosovo, and failed it so abjectly that it had to beg the United States to get involved in an area where then-President Bush (and later President Clinton) took a lot of persuading the US had any business at all.

Thus arises the inescapable question: who really wishes America would become less internationalist and less involved? One does not need to be a Georgian to see that this is a multi-faceted issue that great thinkers such as Margaret Drabble (quoted to huge effect in these pages) and George Monbiot will never understand.

Even cultural anti-Americanism of the anti-Hollywood and anti-McDonald's form - in which I enthusiastically share - can become tiresome when weighed against, say, the work of one day of the US Pacific fleet in alleviating the results of the Asian tsunami. There is no other power that could have done, or would even have tried to do, anything remotely similar. And suppose the UN had attempted to live up to its responsibilities in Rwanda? Which member of the Security Council would have ended up airlifting the peacekeepers and the medicine and the food?

It's been years since one has looked to the Times as a manual of style, but I have to say I'm a bit shocked at the slapdash way that one of its senior staff can allow herself to write. Many of her sentences are too long and train-wrecked to be quoted here. This is a pity, because they obscure an argument that needs to be asserted against a vapid hubbub of facile and received opinion. ·