People pay attention to the United States and it’s government because it can and often times does actually bomb and invade other countries on a regular basis. And we just don’t attack our neighbors like most countries, we have been known to go out of our way to stick our nose into the affairs of countries on the other side of the globe for total bullshit (WMD’s ring a bell?). It’s important to keep up on the leadership of the global schizophrenic cop/bully/humanitarian.
Wait, what? Would you mind defining that? Because for my defintion of “virtually every” and “military presence,” uh, no.
Whether or not we agree on a definition, they are still factors that contribute to America’s global visibility, and that of its important personages. So, quibble on, if you wish.
Armed Forces Network claims to reach US military personnel in 177 countries. There are 192 in the UN.
If not every, there’s enough to qualify as an evil empire.
List of United States military bases
Which only has current bases: there were more ( although they could be started up again in case of dire need no doubt ). Plus it’s separated into Army, Navy, Airforce and Marine, each with it’s own Overseas section.
I grew up when small next to an American Army Base in Yorkshire and we weren’t even occupied ( officially ); there’s two USAAF Bases near me in Suffolk.
Most major European countries have a presence — to ensure order as a last resort; there were reasons Italy did not go communist, apart from CIA manipulation — [ And obviously there are separate CIA etc. facilities all over the world ] and plenty of others from Somalia to Brazil.
As the Aged American Loony, and Living National Treasure, Dr. Ron Paul stated in 2011:
“We’re under great threat, because we occupy so many countries,” Paul said. “We’re in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We’re going broke…”
Rated Mostly True by Politifact.
The perceived disparity comes from the fact USAians think this is normal, whilst unable to comprehend the idea of foreign nations having independent Bases within the continental United States. Almost as if they were occupiers or something.
According to this National Geographic survey [PDF file], more than one-third (36%) of young Americans (ages 18-24) couldn’t find Britain on a map*. 26% couldn’t find Australia.
The “irrelevance” attitude really seems more a reflection of the insular “American exceptionalism” mythology rather than a reflection of an occasional reality.
- At least it’s better than the 6% (11% in some other surveys) of young Americans who couldn’t find the United States on a map!
It’s because the US is the most important single country, obviously. But it also I think just becomes a kind of worldwide cultural habit, to be interested and have opinions about US politics. And while the internet is not a scientific experiment, and I’ve also lived overseas in different parts of the world, you quickly see a lot of different opinions on the internet unfiltered by politeness. And IME there’s lots of interest by foreigners in US domestic political issues which have no direct effect on them. Sometimes such discussions are a way to take the US down a peg (why are there so many people in jail, how about racism, etc) but it dwarfs typical US interest in similarly domestic situations in any foreign country.
Your mileage may vary and hard to prove statement, but very clear IMO. In fact foreigners (and Americans who pose as disdainful of the ‘unwashed’ in the US, ie those outside liberal elites…) often try to have this point both ways. Their kneejerk might be to deny what I said in the first paragraph is true, yet they’d soon follow it up by lamenting how much more ‘ignorant’ Americans are of foreign country domestic situations. More like not interested in many cases, and a lot of (often quite biased and incomplete) foreign knowledge of strictly domestic US issues is based on an interest there’s not a clear reason for.
With that said, another basic fact is that larger countries tend to be more insular, naturally, which partly explains the relatively low average interest of Americans in other countries. You’ll find the same in a lot of other big countries. Although degree of interest in the outside world also depends on economics and the role of trade. That’s also smaller in the US economy than say Germany’s, another relatively big country. But it’s also smaller in less advanced countries. You’re not going to find a lot of interest in or knowledge of various far away countries in even small backward countries, the way you would in say the Netherlands.
Bill Clinton is still president, right?
Yes we know about US presidents etc because they are intimately involved in “starting” wars that we send our boys and girls to help out with. As an ally of USA we try to keep and eye on things, a lot of Aussies would also know about other world leaders as we are reliant on the rest of the world to a larger degree that some places.
Because Australian News organisations can get cheap filler content from the USA.
Since the TV stations can get low-cost vision from the USA, they just back up the truck and pile it in.
This is possible because the USA generates a LOT of English-language TV content. But sports and weather doesn’t export well, and even human-interest / cute kittens work better with localisation. That leaves politics, and mostly only national-level politics. Some California/New York local politics, because that’s where the media organisations are based, nothing from Ohio or Kansas.
Presidential primary races get as much coverage here in AUS as they do in the USA. They aren’t important here: we aren’t voting. It’s just used to fill up the news hour when they don’t have anything else, which is most of the time.
yeah to back up Melbourne, we get a lot of content on our tellies from that American bloke Murdoch…
Yes, but I think general public awareness of leading figures in US politics long predates the practice by commercial television stations of filling up over-long news bulletins with cheap content sourced from overseas. And this general awareness would also be found in countries which don’t have this practice even now.
It comes down to the fact that the US is internationally influential in a way that few other countries are. In his OP, dstarfire makes the point that he couldn’t name the Prime Minister of Canada. I dare say if you go to Britain or Germany or Australia you’ll find that most people can name the President of the US, and probably some other signficant figures in US politics, but not the Prime Minister of Canada.
That may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that even for those of us who are well-versed in geography and history, there are quite a few nations that are so small as to be irrelevant.
I mean, plenty of people know who the Dutch are, and of the existence of the Netherlands, and a lot of us have even visited the country (and loved it, BTW), but it just doesn’t really matter to most of us whether Mark Rutte or Jan Peter Balkenende is Prime Minister.
Nosy. Jealous. Obsessively xenophobic. Bored.
Especially that last one.
If the biggest item on your national news broadcast is the establishment of a new parliament committee to look into moose-logging truck collisions, the Boehner-Obama feud will look fascinating.
Huh. You think maybe I should have said something like “except to the extent it affects them” in my post?
Me neither. Cool.