Romney is not alone on Israel

Yanks! You either love 'em or hate 'em. Or (like me) both. Until I went to live and work in the US some 12 years ago my experience of Yanks was confined to meeting them at conferences and spending time as a tourist in their midst. The US is a vast country. Most of its citizens do not have passports and so have never ventured beyond its borders. As a tourist I found Americans helpful and eager to please. As a non-resident alien I found them warm, sincere and tolerant of difference. But I also found them brash, insular and ignorant of the world outside of their own city or state. Of course these are sweeping generalisations. I lived in New York, which as a teeming multi-ethnic metropolis is quite untypical of the US. Typical America, however, is small-town America: friendly up to a point (being an English alien certainly helped) but basically suspicious of outsiders and contemptuous of foreigners.

Mitt Romney, who served for four years as Governor of Massachusetts and who will in November challenge Barack Obama for the presidency, is a case in point. True, Romney can lay claim to some international experience since he once worked as a missionary for the Mormon church in France. But that was a long time ago. Romney's faith - his religious faith - in the "exceptionalism" of the US is total, without qualification.That is to say, he believes that the US is the most perfect example we have of a liberal democracy, and that it is the mission of the US and of its citizens to spread the values of this democracy to the rest of mankind. By extension (as it were), the US has little, if anything, to learn from others. This creed may sound exceedingly strange to our ears, but I assure you it is a doctrine widely proclaimed throughout the US, and a dogma widely espoused well beyond the circle of the Mormon faithful.

Last month Romney visited the UK for the opening of the 2012 Olympics. He made some insensitive and (as things turned out) quite ill-founded remarks about London's readiness to host and was - qui-te rightly - taken to task both by Prime Minister David Cameron and by Mayor Boris Johnson. Back in the US the Democrats made the most of these gaffes ("Romneyshambles"), as they were of course entitled to do.

On his foreign trip, Romney also visited Israel. At a fundraising dinner he referred in what I assume were deliberately unmistakeable terms to "the hand of providence" that in his view had watched over the Jewish state, and to its underlying cultural values that - again in his view - had resulted in its marked economic success compared with its Palestinian neighbours. And speaking against the backdrop of the Old City he referred to Jerusalem as "the capital of Israel".