America has been a big net good to the world

America has just celebrated its 250th birthday so it seems fitting to ask whether America, in net terms, has done more harm than good, or vice versa, over those years?

For the average Irish person, the question will seem ridiculous. By the average Irish person, I mean those who don’t think primarily ideologically. These ‘normies’ will emphatically believe that, overall, America has been a net good in the world. They might complain about this or that president, for example, Donald Trump, and they might deplore certain American actions in the world, for example the Vietnam War. But overall, they will still think America has done more good than harm.

Certainly, they will see America as a friend of Ireland for a long time now. Millions of us have gone to live in America, peaking in the Famine years but continuing at a steady pace for well over a century after that.

We love to quote the figure that something like 30 or 40 million Americans claim Irish roots. We love the fact that every St Patrick’s Day our Taoiseach gets an automatic meeting with the US president in the White House. No other country gets an automatic meeting like this. It is the envy of the diplomatic circuit in Washington. We are a small country, after all. Why doesn’t Britain, or Germany, or India for that matter get an automatic annual meeting?

Connections

The answer seems to be that Irish-Americans are good at politics. American presidents see it as a way of courting the Irish-American vote and the White House meeting is almost always a low-stakes, friendly event. It’s a fantastic ad for Ireland.

We have always courted American tourism, and we serve up a traditional old-fashioned version of Ireland for Americans, from Blarney Castle to Bunratty Castle with a bit of the Quiet Man thrown in for good measure.

We also know perfectly well that America has been absolutely brilliant for the Irish economy, going right back to Henry Ford founding a car factory in Cork in 1917, our exports to America, and of course the huge amount of American investment here now. We are currently earning billions from these American corporations, and we would be pretty much lost without them.

So, from an Irish point of view, America has been a gigantic net good.

We can argue that Ireland has also been a big net good for America. For one thing, we helped to build the Catholic Church in the United States.

What about for the rest of the world? Well, for Europe as a whole it has also been a huge net good. As with the Irish, lots of other Europeans have emigrated to the United States over the years and have made their home there. In fact, the Irish are not the biggest ethnic group in the US. That would be the Germans.

We can also be thankful that America has been a democratic country since the outset”

America has been a huge trading partner for Europe for a very long time and that trade has been mostly mutually enriching.

And crucially, if America did not exist, what would have happened in World War 1 and 2? The Germans might have won both of them. In Asia and the Pacific, Imperial Japan would have had no rival.

Thanks to America, both Japan and Germany are now peaceful, prosperous democratic nations.

We can also be thankful that America has been a democratic country since the outset. There was no overriding reason why that should have been the case. What real democracies were there in Europe at that time?

Now let’s look at the negative side of the ledger. The first and biggest mark against America is that for the first 90 or so years of its existence, slavery was permitted in many states. In fact, there is something called the ‘1619 Project’ (promoted by the New York Times) which argues that the true founding year of America was not 1776, when independence was declared, but 1619 when the first slaves arrived in what became the United States. This was America’s ‘original sin’.

Sins

There is no arguing against the fact that slavery is a huge stain on American history, and in fact on the history of the whole of the Americas. Over the centuries of the slave trade about 50% of African slaves ended up in Brazil, 30% in the Caribbean, and 5% in the United States. It is the original sin of the entire region.

But it is still a stretch to say we would have been better off if America had never existed because of this. Slavery was also a big part of European history, and indeed, world history. Slavery was a universal fact for a very, very long time.

As we know, of course, many Irish missionaries in South America ended up becoming very anti-American, and for understandable reasons. The US has always interfered in Latin American affairs, even before the communist era. America has basically regarded Latin America as its backyard and is very hostile towards anything happening in its ‘backyard’ that would go against its economic or security interests. To this end, it has often supported military dictatorships, which is the main reason why many Irish missionaries became anti-American. It is hard to argue against this sentiment.

But if America was, in fact, founded on two ‘original sins’, not just slavery, but also the displacement and sometimes mass killing of the native peoples already there, then the same applies to the whole of the Americas. We then must ask if it would have been better if no South, Central or North American country should exist in the form they took after the Europeans arrived?

But if we follow this logic, then we would have to roll back pretty much the whole of history because few countries have been founded peacefully. This is a very unfortunate fact of life, but a fact, nonetheless. The way countries are founded isn’t so much an indictment against any given country, but against human nature itself.

The case against America is, in some ways, the case against any powerful country: they throw their weight around. But as great powers go, America has been much more benign than the historical norm, despite its undoubted flaws. If America was not the great power it is, then some other great power would have filled the void. Imperial Japan and Germany, followed by Nazi Germany, or maybe the Soviet Union, would have been prime candidates to do so.

And so I, for one, am very glad that the United States exists, and the vast majority of Irish people have excellent reasons to feel the same. Happy birthday, America.