There's little awareness of how the budget crisis has eroded US credibility. It's time for a reverse Christopher Columbus
By Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian, Tuesday 15 October 2013
On Monday, government offices were closed in Washington DC, to mark Columbus Day. Except that most of them had been closed anyway, because of the US government shutdown.
As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who,
in the service of the Spanish crown, supposedly "discovered" America and
reported its potential to a wondering world. I have spent the summer in
the United States watching, with growing alarm, a country engaged in a
degree of self-harming which, if observed in a teenager, would lead any
friend to cry "call the doctor at once". As I set course back to Europe,
my conclusion is this: America should do a reverse Columbus. The world
no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to
discover the world's view of America.
Ordinary Americans, and
especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican
primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking
and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the
erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted –
while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with
locked antlers.
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