The US dislikes successful foreign governments, especially those that help the common people
The US wants governments that focus on helping businesses—particularly American businesses—and any attention devoted to increasing the common welfare is viewed as a suspicious misdirection of effort. Paul Katz has a column in Salon on the success of Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the US reactions to her successes:
When Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was reelected two weeks ago by the largest margin of any leader since the return of democracy in 1983, even her bitterest opponents had to admit that she’d done something right. Clarín, Buenos Aires’ highest-circulation daily and a strong contender for the title of Kirchner’s enemy No. 1, acknowledged that the president had earned her victory by creating jobs and prosperity. Mauricio Macri, the conservative mayor of Buenos Aires, congratulated Fernández and told reporters, “If things go well for the president, things go well for us.”
But on the pages of America’s leading newspapers, the tone was strikingly less conciliatory. Despite her evident success, the New York Times dedicated itself to cataloging Fernandéz’s failings before concluding, in the voice of one source, that Argentine economic growth will soon slow and “there will be a political reckoning.” The editorial board of the Washington Post echoed this prediction, warning that Fernández might turn to authoritarian measures to preserve her power and suggesting, “so far the signs are not good.”
The U.S. press has been forecasting imminent disaster since Fernández’s late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, assumed office in 2003, promising to prioritize shared recovery over foreign lenders left in the cold by the country’s 2002 sovereign debt default. The couple’s unorthodox economic policies have done what Washington experts believed impossible. Kirchner’s way has fostered breakneck growth, dramatically reduced poverty rates and secured “kirchnerismo” three presidential terms. Yet U.S. media outlets have downplayed these achievements in favor of attention to the Kirchners’ perceived instability at home and unpopularity with creditors abroad.
It’s a narrative so ingrained in the DNA of Washington that not even a landslide election could wipe it out. . .
