Straight after 9/11, in a sweet gesture of solidarity, France’s leading newspaper declared: “We are all Americans”. Le Monde’s headline caught the mood but missed the point. In many ways, we are all Americans all the time.
That judgment does not simply reflect the disproportionate weight of the United States – politically, strategically and economically – on the affairs of every other country. Nor does it refer solely to the way in which American influences have permeated other nation’s cultures through films, books, cartoons, television and music.
Those factors can, perforce, make Americans out of all of us. More striking, though, is the passion with which folk around the world follow what occurs in the United States. Intense, intricate, informed interest in the contest between Trump and Harris is one marker, especially compared with the miserable level of public engagement in Albanese against Dutton, Scholz versus Merz, Macron contrasted with Melenchon, or the residual rivalry between Sunak and Starmer.
There they are, Trump and Harris, in our newspapers every morning, on our television screens every night, far more insistent presences than any popular song, blockbuster movie or local prime minister could hope to be.
Anyone anywhere might be absorbed, occasionally and fleetingly, by distant events such as the death of a Queen, a horrendous tsunami, a malfunctioning space station or the Olympic Games. Nonetheless, that sort of vicarious engagement is rarely sustained, quite unlike the continuing fascination with the colour and movement, characters and incidents, in the United States. Elsewhere, as Marx surmised, history might be enacted once as tragedy, the second time as farce. In the United States, though, tragedy and farce are tangled up with burlesque and caricature as well as with drama and consequence. Who could look away?
Less sentimentality might be called for.
Thomas Jefferson reckoned that the United States would always be puzzling and prospering beyond the imagination of people. Even a polymath like Jefferson might not have imagined how his country would also publicise and project itself around the globe.
The 2024 Lowy Institute Poll indicates a certain wariness among Australians towards the United States. 56% of respondents trust the United States to act responsibly, well behind the ratings for France and Japan. Only 59% express warmth on the feelings thermometer, with ten other nations ranking higher. As a supplementary, perhaps respondents might have been asked how often they thought about one country or another.
Focus on the United States might well reduce our bandwidth for what is going on in other regions. A serious observer suggested to me recently that nothing which had ever happened in Latin America had a direct impact on Australia which really mattered. Apart from a bit of commentary on copper prices, the Cairns Group, APEC and Antarctica, I was stumped. Lowy’s 2024 poll analyses our friends in the Indo-Pacific, but, logically, one continent facing the Pacific does not enter the equation.
Less sentimentality might be called for. Some Australians still find it hard to regard Britain as a foreign country, although the British have no difficulty in treating Orstralia as distinctly foreign. Nor should we take New Zealand for granted; they do not rely on rugby union alone to mark their territory.
A reminder from Coriolanus might be timely, in the only line from Shakespeare where the emphasis can be placed on any of four words out of five. “There is a world elsewhere.”
