Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

Suzy Hansen's Notes on a Foreign Country is a clear-eyed look at U.S. foreign policy (particularly in the Middle East) from the perspective of an expat American being enlightened about her country's misdeeds while fulfilling a fellowship in Turkey.

Honestly, while I was initially shocked by Hansen's naivete (which she acknowledges, and even refers to as ignorance, early and often, and which given that, when she departed for Istanbul she did so with an Ivy League education and several years of NYC work experience, only speaks to the larger issue of ignorance of international affairs in this country), she quickly gets to the heart of the matter in terms of the U.S.'s near-continuous and out-sized presence in the Middle East in the past 70-odd years. She builds the case that the U.S. has created an empire quietly and without the awareness of most Americans, and that, as she demonstrates time and time again, U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis. (Case in point: today's headlines regarding the assassination of an Iranian general by the U.S.).

Hansen explores U.S-Turkish relations most closely, as that is where she now lives and has the greatest experience and knowledge, but she does a more-than-passable job is exploring similar imbalances between the U.S. and Afghanistan, Greece, Pakistan, and Latin American countries. Think coups. Lots of coups. Vietnam. The School of the Americas. Cuba and the Philippines. Hansen catalogues them all here, the questionable and the clearly wrong.

Because of the nature of U.S. imperialism, as compared to the old European empires, Hansen builds the case that the U.S. empire is equally if not more insidious and damaging than those older empires, which were openly acknowledged, and whose ties, for better or for worse, were formalized. (Those who haven't read it should follow Hansen's work with James Bradley's primer on the founding of the U.S. empire, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War or Julia Flynn Siler's Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure.)

Notes on a Foreign Country is a timely reminder of the precarious power exercised by the U.S. It is an indictment of U.S. foreign policy from time immemorial, but it is also an indictment of the generalized ignorance that has allowed this policy to continue unabated.

4-and-a-half stars.