yankee, go home

In Italy last month, in the more deserted corners of Florence, I found myself explaining to my mother what the abundance of bright yellow stickers demanding “YANKEE GO HOME” meant. The phrase gained prominence after World War II and is used to express distaste for and opposition to American influence—or even its mere presence—within one’s borders. Drawing on some of our most painful past—the Civil War—its adoption and use span countries from nearly every continent, including our (former?) friends in Canada.

On that day, within a few paces, we were in a lovely little art store. A giant, fuzzy dog greeted me (imagine the type of dog exactly diametrically opposite of Biden’s Commander). I browsed around and landed on their guest book. Flipping through the pages, I saw greeting after greeting from students abroad and tourists alike—Indiana, North Carolina, Iowa, California, New York. One Japanese visitor had drawn and signed a small cartoon rendering of our gigantic fluffy friend, but the thick stack otherwise held only American scrawl.

So many parts of the world rightfully or erroneously hold a strong distaste for Americans and their government—even in countries like Italy that have not, post-WWII, faced our direct wrath via drones or psy-ops or the tumbling of democratically elected leaders because we didn’t like them just quite enough. But they are also tied economically, culturally, and irrevocably to our orbital universe.

This, and the torrent of recent presidential action, has made me reflect on the relationship between our great power—the US—and its friends (+ its foes). When I was younger, my (Chinese) parents explained it to me like this: the US and China are like two giant boats, inextricably bound together. If one goes down, the other does too. It also reminds me of bald eagles—apt for us, I guess. When fighting over territory or food or what-say-you, pairs of eagles might find themselves in a death spiral—talons interlocked and plummeting towards the hard ground, both refusing to release their grip. Sometimes this happens because, due to a bald eagle’s terrifyingly strong muscles, it’s quite a bit easier to clamp their talons than to release them. As we’ve seen with the incendiary threat of tariffs Trump pushed out to our two best (+ only) neighbors, we are, in many ways, trapped in this death spiral with allies, frenemies, and foes alike.

I think this all works out… fine for the US, if not a bit unsettling, until the second enough of the world decides (or positions itself) to realize this is no longer true and unlocks its talons from its still-frozen partner. Take China and Africa, the classic example. While we’ve been meddling in Sudan and withdrawing USAID programs from the continent, China has been pouring in money and investment. In this way, China has wrapped Africa tightly to her breast—looping circle after circle of cord around the two, binding them together in mutual interest.

It all reminds me of a great quip about the European Union from the book Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall:

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.

Here we are, extricating ourselves from the world we helped create—the world we serve(d?) as captains of. The slow passing of time and the dissipation of memory lull our nation into a false sense of security: distance between us and others leaves only room for swinging—perhaps we have forgotten that others also wield iron fists.

So many of our troubles at home—political turmoil, tussling, and jostling—serve only to distract from and add fuel to much larger problems. Though a tad dramatic, George Packer points this out wryly in his book Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.

Pax Americana began to decay at its very height. If you ask me when the long decline began, I might point to 1998. We were flabby, smug, and self- absorbed. Imagine a president careless enough to stumble into his enemies’ trap and expend his power on a blue dress. Imagine a superpower so confident of perpetual peace and prosperity that it felt able to waste a whole year on Oval Office cocksucking. Not even Al Qaeda, which blew up two American embassies in East Africa that August, could get our serious attention—Clinton’s response, a bunch of Tomahawks, was derided left and right for following the script of De Niro’s Wag the Dog. The Republicans decided that destroying the president was more urgent than the national interest, and they attacked his every move at home and abroad. Our leaders believed they had the luxury to start tearing one another apart, and they’ve never stopped. Did any country ever combine so much power with so little responsibility? And slowly, imperceptibly at first, we lost that essential faith in ourselves.

Yes, sometimes it’s not that deep—Florentines don’t love getting trampled by loud American tourists, and who can blame them? But all this circumlocution is to say I deeply fear American decay—due to isolation, due to hubris, due to dangerously self-indulgent infighting. On Richard Holbrooke, the latter-20th-century American diplomat and the subject of Our Man:

He loved America. Not in a chest-beating way—he didn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel—but without having to try, because he was the child of parents who had given everything to become American.

Just the same—and for much the same reason—I love my country. I fear that dragging ourselves out of the tight embrace of globalization-as-foreign-policy will leave me to raise my children in a country that stands as a big power, but not a great one.

**Cover image credits: https://thematthewrome.com/2024/12/08/yankee-go-home-the-psychology-behind-the-annoying-american-trope/