International Nationalism

Many of my bloggers are aware that I am a “US Foreign Service” brat, the stepson of an American diplomat who entered the US Department of State after service as an Army (later Air Force) officer during WWII. My mother, who worked as an analyst with the Department, married my stepfather… and we were immediately posted to the US Embassy in Beirut Lebanon. How exotic that was for me, but I soon fell in love with the country and the people, understanding the complexity of dealing in a world of different belief systems, expectations and values. I learned to respect those differences, making friends and absorbing the differences by discovering the similarities. I was 13 when I arrived, 17 when I left.

The United States was obsessed with fighting “communism” in those days. America was generally held in high regard as the model society. Excellent local Lebanese high schoolers often found their way to colleges and universities in France, England but most of all the United States. One of the best universities in the entire Middle East was the American University of Beirut, where I wound up taking an advanced science class when my high school ran out of advanced placement courses in that field. It was exceptional. It was also the home of the best regional hospital and a training ground for top medical students. I got some pretty spectacular emergency treatment there on more than one occasion. Don’t ask!

For so many developing nations and those without a history of super-exceptional colleges and universities, from Mexico to the People’s Republic of China, their go-to alternatives were often the best institutions of higher learning in the United States and England. Some future presidents and prime ministers got their educations in significant part in this way. Russia offered a tailored course of instruction with severe political bias as an alternative, but they carefully focused on training foreign students to be their operatives and allies when they graduated. Western universities simply mingled foreign students into their general curricula, what every student was offered regardless of country of origin. 

For colleges and universities that were in dire need of financial support, these students were usually full-tuition attendees with scholarships from their countries of origin… or perhaps with parents who found some way to pay full freight. This full-tuition aspect of foreign students, not relying on any local financial aid, later became a subject of controversy as foreign students seemed to be displacing American born students, primarily for these financial reasons. As the federal government and states cut direct grants for post-secondary education while raising tuition, an absurd and deeply impactful failure of our nation to invest in itself, foreign students were often coveted by American colleges and university who needed the money.

For a number of those attracted to the highest level of scientific and engineering, many remained in the United States creating one of the greatest pools of American startups-turned-mega-corporations, a massive set of job creators in this country, filling up our rather substantial deficit of locally born Americans with the right STEM education. That was the way it worked for decades. When I was in my undergraduate years in the United States, I thoroughly enjoyed the friendships I made with individuals from all over the world. Some of my classmates wound up in the highest reaches of leadership in their home countries. They carried their understanding an appreciation of the United States into their diverse roles.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China and the sequential bungling of our exceptionally long wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, the United States slowly became suspicious of foreigners, turning inwards and slowly closing doors that were once flung open to create deep connective tissue between America, once the exemplar of democracy and economic success, and so many developing countries. Even before the pandemic decimated cross-border travel and education, the philosophy of American “superiority” and “America First” began to seal our borders against one of the most powerful aspects of American power across the globe: training future business, scientific and political leaders.

Xenophobia manifest itself in immigration restrictions, not just across our southern “we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it” era but in our denying educational and H-IB visas for essential workers where the US simply did not have sufficient qualified STEM applicants. The Trump era was highly exclusionary to foreigners, a trend that does not seem to have reversed itself during the Biden administration, pushed a bit harder by the never-ending COVID experience. As the neo-populist anti-science, anti-education sentiment has taken root as a driving force in the Republican Party, the denigration of higher education, exacerbated by the exclusionary era of “white American me,” seems to have been slammed at every level. National security, justifiable at some level, was often the justification for throwing foreigners, particularly Chinese, out of US universities… a “baby with the bathwater” policy.

But make no mistake, this exclusionary trend was also becoming a global epidemic as Emily J. Levine, Stanford Associate Professor of education and history, writing for the November 14th Los Angeles Times, explains: “The cosmopolitan values of higher education are in retreat before a rising wave of provincialism. International student enrollment at universities in the United States continues to decline, while branch campuses of American universities abroad are being reorganized or shut down. This trend has ominous implications — and not only for education and research.

“Universities stand at the intersection of national interest and universal goals. While they play a role in nation-building, they also promote the pursuit of truth, which has historically benefited from the free exchange of ideas and the free movement of scholars and students across borders…. In an era of dwindling global institutions, the university is the latest to experience a decline in power and influence. The open flow of ideas is now at risk.” 

Some countries, notably Canada as evidenced by the above graphic, invited the best and the brightest to study and work in that country, an effort to absorb those future leaders and scientists that could no longer study or work in America. Major US tech companies in dire need of STEM expertise quickly opened new research centers in Canada. Canada wanted those job-creators even as the US no longer did. Joint research efforts involving the US are dying on the vine, just as other nations see our policies as their opportunity to replace us (does “they shall not replace us” sound familiar?).

“In 2020, President Trump issued an order banning Chinese graduate students and researchers in a number of scientific fields. President Biden’s administration has maintained the ban. This year, Sen. Tom Cotton(R-Ark.) proposed a prohibition on funding from Chinese entities to U.S. universities and the end of the 10-year multiple-entry visa program for Chinese citizens.

“American nationalists like Cotton rarely acknowledge that the Chinese are following a path laid by U.S. students. In the 19th century, nearly 10,000 Americans traveled to study at universities in Germany. When they returned, they established institutions modeled on the ones they found abroad.

“The Americans’ adaptations of the German universities were so effective that by 1900, the flow of traffic reversed. Germans attended the World’s Fairs in Chicago and St. Louis to learn about American developments in higher education, such as coeducation and applied mathematics. Research and innovation in the natural sciences and the humanities expanded as a result of this ‘competitive emulation.’

“Despite some German concerns that American students might steal trade secrets, intellectual curiosity overcame protectionism. Scientists and scholars from the two countries became partners as well as competitors. Professors traveled back and forth between New York and Berlin on exchanges, sharing and advancing ideas. One Prussian education leader marveled that this mutual learning ‘represents progress … in the direction of the intellectual unity of the human race.’

“The two world wars undermined academic cooperation. The university was pulled toward the state, and faculty members promoted themselves as experts who could advance national goals… After World War II, it took numerous efforts to revive the dormant values of transatlantic scientific exchange and transparency. Even the international programs of the Cold War era, such as the Ford Foundation-funded Free University of Berlin, the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service, were more expressions of ‘soft power’ than true scientific partnerships.” Levine. As America disengages from the world, closes the opportunity to build lasting bridges and train/hire the best and the brightest on earth, we simply plunge in our influence and global competitive edge. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and that “soft power” has been the major path to America’s success at the cutting edge of scientific/engineering achievement and political influence in modern times.