WorldAffairs: The Legacy of US Colonialism

While the US has moved away from the term “colony,” the legacy of its colonial rule endures. In this week’s episode, we’re talking about America’s covert history of expansion and how that has impacted the people who live in those places. Daniel Immerwahr, professor of history at Northwestern University and author of the book, How to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States, and Ed Morales, journalist and author of the new book, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico, join WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez to discuss how Puerto Rico and other American territories navigate their complicated national identities.

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The Memory Palace: Stories about the St. Louis

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Scientific American: Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue (September 1, 2018)

Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.

Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex. Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.

When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives, concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.

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openDemocracy: Cuba and Europe getting closer

First of all, the concretion of an 18 million euros cooperation project on renewable energy, the very first to give actual content to the new bilateral relations framework, on an issue of special relevance for Cuba, which aims to include a significant component of non-polluting energies to its energy matrix, coinciding in general terms with the policy proposals of the EU in this area. [...]

The expressed will to promote exchanges for the European Year of Cultural Heritage and to support the celebrations of the 500-year anniversary of the founding of the city of Havana in 2019 - a request that historian Eusebio Leal made publicly to Federica Mogherini during her visit to Cuba last January, and which she gladly accepted – were among the finer topics on which decisions were also made.  [...]

The Cuban government, for its part, has expressed its wish for "a more active participation of the European Union in the economic development" of the island. The chancellor, Bruno Rodríguez, considers that the conditions are favourable for expanding ties further.

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Bloomberg: Reality Check: Europe Won't Roll Over on Iran

Trump’s attitude toward Europe is clear: He considers the European Union a collection of puffed-up small countries dependent on the U.S. for economic survival and military protection. In Trump’s view, these little nations will always cave to pressure. That stance was conveyed by the imperious tweet from the the newly arrived U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who ordered German companies that do business in Iran to “wind down operations immediately.” Grenell has since explained that the tweet followed “the exact language sent out from the White House talking points” on Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal. [...]

There is little respect for Trump in European capitals, except, perhaps, in Warsaw and Budapest, which don’t call the shots on trade. French, German and U.K. politicians consider his presidency an aberration and a temporary setback. The current plan, inasmuch as there is one, is to outlast Trump and preserve all the frameworks he’s trying to break until the next U.S. president takes office. That’s the case with the Paris climate accord as much as with the Iran deal. No one in Moscow or Tehran should expect moderate leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Emmanuel Macron or, especially, Prime Minister Theresa May, to suddenly turn anti-American just because Trump is in the White House. [...]

There’s no reason for Trump to count on weaker resistance today, especially since Iran presents a far greater economic opportunity than Cuba did. In Cuba, the biggest European investments were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Iran, a country that holds 7 percent of the world’s entire mineral reserves, attracted $7.38 billion in approved foreign investment projects between January 2016 and September 2017 after taking in only $2 billion in 2015. Most of the new money is coming from China and the EU. Still, the U.S. sanctions could have deep consequences: If France’s Total, which has a big U.S. operation, is forced to pull out of Iran’s South Pars project, China’s CNPC, which is now Total’s partner, would likely take over. It’s not clear to the Europeans why they should leave the investment opportunity to the Chinese. Total wants the EU to fight its corner.

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Al Jazeera: Cuba's economic future after the Castros

"What we can expect from Miguel Diaz-Canel is policy continuity and gradual economic reform, but no democratic political opening or Cuba's moving towards a more pluralistic political system," explains Diego Moya-Ocampos, a senior analyst at IHS Markit.

In general terms, "Canel is Raul Castro's boy, and change will continue being steered by Raul Castro, who'll remain the head of the Communist Party ... Canel will try to enable change in a way that it will not let the old Castro revolutionary guards or military establishment feel uncomfortable.

"The military and security apparatus play a key role behind the scenes, controlling the economy and any gradual opening of the economy will have to be done at the pace at which it will not increase the hopes or the expectations of the local population", says Moya-Ocampos.

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Quartz: What will Cuba’s revolution look like without a Castro in charge?

The National Assembly on Thursday confirmed the only candidate for the post, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s first vice president and a Communist Party loyalist. He replaces Raúl Castro, who took over the country’s leadership from his brother Fidel in 2006. [...]

Still, in many ways, Cuba’s presidential transition is far from revolutionary. It’s part of the periodic updating the Castro brothers have carried out to maintain Cuba’s socialist regime, whether it be by opening up the economy or dialing back state repression. Like his predecessors, Cuba’s new president will have to rejigger the definition of the Castro revolution to handle the island’s economic and political reality—currently in a precarious state. [...]

The latest iteration of the revolution, as shaped by Raúl, is still in dire need of revision, observers point out. It remains hobbled by its two-currency system—one for locals, another pegged to the dollar for tourists and international business—that stalls economic growth. Cuba must also deal with the collapse of Venezuela, which it relied upon for cheap oil.

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Jacobin Magazine: Russia Was a Latecomer to the Cyberwar Game

“Authoritarian regimes tend to learn from democracies, and really all this stuff started with the United States in 2010” — three years before Russia’s Internet Research Agency was founded — says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University, who co-authored a report last year titled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” documenting such manipulation by governments in twenty-eight countries. [...]

Other governments have no qualms with using such tools to manipulate both their own and other countries’ populations, China and Russia being foremost among them. The Philippines’ Duterte, meanwhile, is renowned for heading a virtual army that uses Facebook to promote the president and attack his critics, especially potent given the powerful position social media has in the country. [...]

The best evidence we have for this are the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden. In a series of stories in 2014, the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald exposed the array of capabilities at the disposal of UK and US intelligence agencies. A “menu” of cyber tools used by the GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), for instance, included a system for using complaints to sites like YouTube about offensive comment to get material removed, the ability to change the outcome of online polls, the manipulation of a website’s internet traffic and search ranking, the ability to “masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries,” and much more. The latter two are particularly notable, given the recent SMIC-funded research into the effects of the different ordering of content on social media and the web. [...]

There’s evidence that the United States is engaged in similar activities. In 2014, the Associated Press revealed a secret effort by the US government to foment anti-government unrest in Cuba by creating a clandestine, Twitter-like service on mobile-phone networks called ZunZeo. The plan was to first build up a critical mass of subscribers by promoting “noncontroversial content,” then start introducing political material that would provoke Cubans into organizing protests and, eventually, a mass uprising.

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The Economist: Is the pope head of the world's most powerful government?

Is the pope head of the world's most powerful government? The pope represents over one billion people, his government has a permanent presence at the United Nations and he runs the oldest diplomatic service on earth. 

Jacobin Magazine: Against Conspiracy Theories

To be blunt, this is hokum. It’s true that Kennedy made a few decisions that angered one faction or another of the national security establishment; almost every president does at some point. But overall, Kennedy was a gift to that establishment, a militaristic, anticommunist hawk dressed up in the soft garments of trite, inspirational liberalism. Kennedy perpetuated the myth of a US-Soviet “missile gap” to win the 1960 election, despite almost certainly being informed it didn’t exist. (To be fair, there was a missile gap — it was just in the United States’ favor). Once in office, he then sharply increased military spending, expanded the US nuclear arsenal, and stationed nuclear-armed missiles around the world.  

The Cuban missile crisis could have been avoided had Kennedy put a stop to the CIA’s ultimately disastrous Cuban regime change operation, including multiple assassination attempts against Castro. Sure, he resisted some of the most extreme elements of the national security establishment, but Kennedy was a reliable Cold Warrior. And while there’s evidence he had private doubts about Vietnam, so did almost every policymaker involved in that catastrophe. As it happens, Kennedy initially expanded the US presence there, despite his personal ambivalence.  [...]

To some extent, this conspiracy theory is a funhouse mirror reflection of the Bush administration’s very real dishonesty and depravity. But it’s also a bizarre distraction from the administration’s very real, behind-the-scenes wrongdoing around September 11 — from the fact that Bush was on vacation all of August while warnings of an attack came in (some of which were simply ignored) to the administration’s very real conspiracy to lie its way into the Iraq War. In fact, to some extent the nuttiness of the inside-job theories helped delegitimize such critiques.

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Jacobin Magazine: Assessing Che

First, he shared with them a revolutionary politics from above that allowed him to retain, along with the Castros, the political control and initiative on the island, based on a monolithic conception of a type of socialism immune to any democratic control and initiative from below.

Like the Castro brothers, Guevara had a deep commitment to the one-party state and to an extreme version of vanguardism, which he sometimes took to the level of absurdity.

For example, his response to the social and political conditions he found in the eastern Congo, which he himself acknowledged lacked any of the necessary conditions for socialist revolution — such as the demand for land on the part of the vast rural population, a working class (which did exist in the Katanga region), and a significant imperialist presence that could provoke a sentiment of national resistance — was to create a vanguard Communist Party that would singlehandedly lead the revolution in that part of the country. [...]

Guevara’s personal and political characteristics — his political honesty and his radical egalitarianism — might have made him better suited to being a Communist oppositionist than a long-term Communist ruler who would have needed to live with the growth of inequality and corruption that has accompanied the Cuban Revolution.

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said religious freedom is one of the key demands they will make of Cuba when they finish reviewing former President Barack Obama's opening with the island. The administration has never been more specific, but outside groups have accused Cuba of systematically repressing the island's growing ranks of evangelicals and other Protestants with acts including the seizure of hundreds of churches across the island, followed by the demolition of many. [...]

Clergy and academics say Cuba's 11 million people include some 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God, which had roughly 10,000 members in the early 1990s, when Cuba began easing restrictions on public expressions of religious faith. The church council estimates there are about 25,000 evangelical and other Protestant houses of worship across the country. About 60 percent of the population is baptized Catholic, with many also following Afro-Cuban syncretic traditions such as Santeria. [...]

The Cuban constitution now recognizes freedom of religion, but the law is silent on the issue of church construction. In a system where the government has long monopolized public life, virtually all activities are presumed illegal unless the law says otherwise. Authorities in some areas have prohibited new churches, even as they allow worship in religious buildings erected before Cuba's 1959 revolution.

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Quartz: This Holocaust remembrance project is tweeting the names of refugees who died because the US turned them away

The United States’ approach to immigration is changing dramatically under president Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order targeting illegal immigrants, and is soon expected to sign another that could indefinitely block certain refugees.

A new Twitter account is highlighting another example of the US denying entry to refugees. Using data from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (USHMM), a Holocaust Remembrance Day project is tweeting out the names and stories of passengers from the St. Louis Manifest, a German transatlantic liner carrying 937 passengers, the vast majority of whom were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The ship was forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States denied its passengers entry.

The Manifest was originally headed for Cuba, where most of its passengers planned to stay until the US approved their visas. But by the time they arrived, the Cuban president had issued a decree invalidating passengers’ recently issued landing certificates, forcing the ship to turn around with most of them still on board. Although the liner sailed close to the United States, and some passengers had contacted president Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for refuge, the US did not take measures to permit the refugees to enter the country.

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Foreign Policy: Barack Obama’s Shaky Legacy on Human Rights

But the truth is, a careful review of Obama’s major human rights decisions shows a mixed record. In fact, he has often treated human rights as a secondary interest — nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority he championed.

His actions on counterterrorism provide a case in point. Obama took office with great promise, announcing on his second day that he would stop CIA torture immediately and close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. By all accounts, the torture did stop. But Obama has steadfastly refused to prosecute those responsible or even to allow the release of much more than the summary of a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report that documented it. As a result, rather than reaffirming the criminality of torture, Obama leaves office sending the lingering message that, should future policymakers resort to it, prosecution is unlikely. Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric about reinstating waterboarding (“or worse”), this is hardly an academic point, even considering the opposition of his nominee for defense secretary. [...]

With respect to surveillance, Obama seems to have continued and expanded programs begun by George W. Bush that lead to massive invasions of privacy. Once Edward Snowden alerted the public to these programs (for which he deserves gratitude, not prosecution), the president did initiate some reforms. He supported legislation to limit the National Security Agency’s ability to collect phone records in bulk under one program and to bring more transparency to the specialized foreign intelligence surveillance court. But most of the mass privacy violations that Snowden disclosed remain unaddressed. Obama maintains that when it comes to non-U.S. citizens abroad, the U.S. government is free to sweep up not only records of their email and telephone communications but also the content of those communications. Needless to say, other intelligence agencies, including those with which the United States cooperates closely, are then implicitly free to do the same to U.S. citizens.

Counterterrorism aside, Obama has taken a few important steps, some of which Trump is now threatening to reverse. Early in his tenure, while he still had some cooperation from Congress, Obama passed health-care reform, going a long way toward upholding the right to the highest attainable standard of health by enhancing Americans’ access to health insurance. He got on board with marriage equality, helping secure the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition of the right to same-sex marriage. He also ended “don’t ask, don’t tell” for gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. military, opening military service to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, including transgender people. His support for LGBT rights also became an increasingly important part of his foreign-policy agenda.

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Politico: Why Raul Castro is happy Fidel is gone

So what will the newly liberated Raul look like as a leader? He remains as poorly understood today as at any time in his more than 60 years in public life, in large part because he has existed in the shadow of his more charismatic brother. For decades there have been contradictory images of the dogmatic enforcer and the overly sensitive patsy, but the strongest clue as to what kind of leader Raul would be emerged when he took nominal control of the country after Fidel’s illness in 2006. It has been a challenging decade for Raul who often found that his boldest reform initiatives were undermined by his weakened but still meddlesome brother who demanded until the end fidelity to his decades-long revolution. But the economic and social pressures facing Cuba give Raul little choice except to make the dramatic changes that he has long wanted to enact. [...]

Raul was content to be cast by his brother as a cruel hard liner, “more radical than I,” as Fidel once propounded. In fact, Raul was long an admirer of Stalin and Soviet communism; he enjoyed vacationing in the Soviet Union, and made many friends there in military and security circles. At home, in a booming baritone, and at Fidel’s urging, he periodically delivered jeremiads meant to instill fear in the Cuban populace. He was a dependably stern player in every one of Fidel’s political purges. It is also known that Raul presided over executions during the guerrilla years in Cuba in the 1950s, and another, a gangland-style murder by his own hand, in Mexico. [...]

His own term in power after 2006, with the ailing Fidel monitoring and second-guessing his decisions, provides useful clues to how he will assert his power now that he is unencumbered by the lurking threat of his brother’s interference. Raul set out almost immediately to put some distance between himself and his brother. He pontificated publicly about the need for the regime to implement “conceptual and structural” changes. Breaking with one of Fidel’s shibboleths, he told the Cuban people that the American economic embargo was not the source of all the country’s severe economic problems; the Cubans had caused the problems themselves. During his first few years at the helm Raul often complained about Cuba’s gross inefficiencies in agriculture, and hinted that serious reforms would be implemented. [...]

What else might he have in mind? He will likely now seek to definitively implement wider market-friendly economic reforms and government sector efficiencies, while trying to forge an independent legacy. He may revert to emphasizing major agricultural reforms by empowering farmers to enjoy profits. The number of trades and professions permitted to open small businesses may well be expanded. Larger numbers of government workers may now be let go, although for security reasons that will always be risky.

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Motherboard: Fidel Castro: Tyrant, Revolutionary, and Environmental Crusader

In 1992, Fidel Castro spoke about a radical new idea. During the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, Cuba’s president lamented the destruction of nature at the hand of humankind. Less than a decade after scientists had reached a consensus on climate change, Castro was already urging the world to start an environmental revolution. [...]

Since his death last week at the age of 90, Cuba’s late-patriarch has been called many things: revolutionary, dictator, savior, and tyrant. And there is evidence for each. But he also seems to have a lesser-known legacy as an environmentalist. [...]

And while Cuba’s wildness can reasonably be attributed to its economic isolation, Castro’s strong influence on the country’s environmental legislation has arguably helped to preserve its splendor.

In the eyes of Castro, environmental destruction was one of the evils of capitalism. He blamed consumer societies for the desecration of nature that disproportionately harmed the poor and disenfranchised. During a speech on climate change in 2002, Castro regarded Cuba as an example of how humanity’s needs can be met “without destroying nature and basic human values.” (It’s important to note here that many Cubans would not agree that their needs are met given the country’s food insecurity and other limited resources.)

After Castro’s Rio de Janeiro speech, Cuba’s government amended its constitution to include sweeping environmental provisions that would safeguard land, air, and water resources. In 1994, the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment—the country’s first cabinet-level institution given jurisdiction over environmental issues—was established. Three years later, Cuba’s Law 81 of the Environment was decreed to provide a framework for sustainable socioeconomic development.

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The Atlantic: How Cubans Live as Long as Americans at a Tenth of the Cost

Many consider it more than decent. After a visit to Havana in 2014, the director-general of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan called for other countries to follow Cuba’s example in health care. Years before, the World Health Organization’s ranking of countries with “the fairest mechanism for health-system finance” put Cuba first among Latin American and Caribbean countries (and far ahead of the United States).

Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. The humanitarian-physician Paul Farmer notes in his book Pathologies of Power that there’s a saying in Cuba: “We live like poor people, but we die like rich people.” Farmer also notes that the rate of infant mortality in Cuba has been lower than in the Boston neighborhood of his own prestigious hospital, Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s. [...]

The difference comes back to the basic fact that in Cuba, health care is protected under the constitution as a fundamental human right. The U.S. protects unlimited firearms and freedom from quartering soldiers but does not guarantee health care. Instead we compromise, taking inefficient and expensive half-measures to rescue people in serious peril. [...]

It’s largely done, as the BBC has reported, through an innovative approach to primary care. Family doctors work in clinics and care for everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. At least once a year, the doctor knocks on your front door (or elsewhere, if you prefer) for a check-up. More than the standard American ritual of listening to your heart and lungs and asking if you’ve noticed any blood coming out of you abnormally, these check-ups involve extensive questions about jobs and social lives and environment—information that’s aided by being right there in a person’s home.

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The New Yorker: A New Cuba (OCTOBER 3, 2016)

Obama said that his operating theory was based on three premises. “No. 1 was, Cuba is a tiny, poor country that poses no genuine threat to the United States. No. 2, in this era of the Internet and global capital movements, is that openness is a more powerful change agent than isolation. That’s not always the case. There are unique circumstances, like North Korea, which is such a closed system that all you do there is reward those who are in power, and there’s no capacity to reach people.

“No. 3 was the belief that, if you are interested in promoting freedom, independence, civic space inside of Cuba, then the power of things like remittances to give individual Cubans some cash, even if the government was taking a cut, that then allowed them to start a barbershop, or a cab service, was going to be the engine whereby individual Cubans—not directed by the United States, not directed by the C.I.A., not through some grand conspiracy, but Cuban people—who now have their own little shop and have a little bit of savings can start expecting more.” [...]

The project, according to Obama and a number of his key advisers, started with the modest goal of tweaking a few regulations, but it evolved into an ambitious bid to open up Cuba’s closed system, by using seduction instead of force. For a generation brought up with the terror of the Cuban missile crisis, this meant abandoning a half-century-long crusade. Over the years, the United States had tried to dislodge the Castro regime by a variety of methods, including invasion, attempted assassination, funding dissidents, and a baroque plot to create a fake Twitter service that was intended to aid an antigovernment uprising. When Obama announced the opening with Cuba, John Boehner, then the Republican Speaker of the House, said, “There is no ‘new course’ here, only another in a long line of mindless concessions to a dictatorship that brutalizes its people and schemes with our enemies.” For a younger generation, though, it seemed obvious that commerce would triumph over politics. “We just don’t believe that rhetoric about changing the Cuban political system is constructive,” one of Obama’s aides told me. “And we don’t think it resonates broadly with the Cuban people, who are more focussed on their economic well-being.” [...]

I asked Obama why, considering Fidel’s long-standing distrust of the Americans, Raúl had finally stepped forward. “It’s my sense that two things are going on,” he said. “One is that there is a recognition—particularly in light of what’s happening in Venezuela—that sustaining their economic model over the next ten years becomes increasingly untenable. So they’re very much in the mode of: how do we make our economy run without giving up power?” He went on, “My impression also is that Raúl recognizes that any substantial change to their economic system—and, by extension, at least their civil society, if not their full political system—requires him to do the downfield blocking. If a younger generation tries to pull this off without the revolutionary credentials, there will be too much pushback.”

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The New York Times: Obama, Acknowledging U.S. Misdeeds Abroad, Quietly Reframes American Power

Mr. Obama had similarly confronted American misdeeds this year in Cuba, Argentina, Vietnam and Japan, each time raising decades-old but still sensitive actions, framed in the language of reconciliation. In comparison, the last Democrat in the White House, President Bill Clinton, did so once and only indirectly: admitting, in a speech delegated to his secretary of state, the United States’ role in Iran’s 1953 coup.

Mr. Obama’s series of speeches reviewing historical trouble spots highlight several unusual facets of his worldview. They fit within his larger effort to reach out to former adversaries such as Cuba and Myanmar. They assert his belief in introspection and the need to overcome the past. And they highlight his perspective that American power has not always been a force for good.

The White House is not eager to call attention to this practice. The administration is still sensitive after being accused by conservatives of “apologizing for America” in 2009, after Mr. Obama spoke critically of his Republican predecessor during visits to Egypt and France. [...]

Professor Lind stressed that none of Mr. Obama’s comments constitute apology. But nor is the controversy around them without substance. Rather, these speeches touch on a longstanding domestic political divide over the nature of American power. [...]

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this idea, though widespread in the United States, is something of a fallacy. Only Americans believe that the United States’ power is inherently virtuous; elsewhere, people see this idea as not only false, but dangerous.

“The disjuncture in the way that this is seen abroad and at home is one of the huge problems in U.S. foreign policy,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is American. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves but is simply not shared, even by their allies.”

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