my america: letters to americans: all articles

"Can the 'American dream' belong also to the world?" In August 2004, Richard Rorty, who died on 8 June, answered with reflections on imperialism and idealism

The Sierre Leonean filmmaker Sorious Samura wrote a letter to Jesse Jackson for openDemocracy’s My America: Letters to Americans series. This is its first publication.

Dominic Hilton was part of the team working on openDemocracy’s “My America: Letters To Americans” project, in which eighteen non-American nationals wrote to counterparts in the United States. Here he gives his view on aspects of those exchanges and America’s role in role in world affairs.

Can America make allies of Pakistan’s people rather than its military? In the eighteenth - and last - of our Letters to Americans series, Pakistani human rights campaigner Asma Jahangir writes to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-prizewinning author of ‘Ghost Wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden’.

Does United States democracy need the world’s aid? In the seventeenth of our Letters to Americans series, Swedish activist with The World Speaks, Kajsa Klein, writes to the African American writer and civic leader, Julianne Malveaux.

Has America forgotten Russian national interests in pursuit of its own? In the sixteenth of our Letters to Americans series, Sergei Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, writes to Robert V Daniels, professor at the University of Vermont and author of ‘Russia’s Transformation’.

Is America’s foreign policy a slave to political priorities and business interests? In the fifteenth of our Letters to Americans series, Ken Wiwa, justice campaigner and advocate for the Ogoni people in the Niger delta, writes to Gayle Smith, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Can the crucial relationship between the United States and Japan best be served by disagreement as well as harmony? In the fourteenth of our ‘Letters to Americans’ series, Japan’s former ambassador in Washington, Yoshio Okawara, writes to the historian John Dower, author of “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War Two”.

After Iraq, can the oldest transatlantic alliance ever be repaired? In the thirteenth of our Letters to Americans series, Sabine Herold of the libertarian group ‘Liberté Chérie’ writes to Kenneth Timmerman, author of ‘The French Betrayal of America’

How wide is the gap between Americans and Iraqis? In the twelfth of our Letters to Americans series, Iraqi blogger and mother of three sons, Faiza Al-Araji, writes to Anthony Swofford, ex-US marine and author of the 1991 Gulf war memoir, “Jarhead”.

How real, and how rightful, is America’s support for Israel? In the eleventh of our Letters to Americans series, the journalist and West Bank settler Yisrael Harel writes to Jo-Ann Mort, peace campaigner and co-author of a book about the Kibbutzim.

Can the writer’s imagination dissolve the lies of power? In the tenth of our Letters to Americans series, the exiled Chinese poet Yang Lian writes to Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

Is America a model or a bad example for Europe? In the ninth of our Letters to Americans series, Czech Eurosceptic and presidential adviser, Petr Mach, writes to Jeremy Rifkin, author of The European Dream.

Can the United States see its Latin American neighbours as equals not vassals? In the eighth of our Letters to Americans series, the Bolivian labour and anti-privatisation organiser Oscar Olivera writes to Jim Schultz, author of The Democracy Owners' Manual. 

Is the United States’s love affair with human rights over? In the seventh of our Letters to Americans series, the Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi writes a heartfelt letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, pioneer of American humanitarianism and commitment to the United Nations.

Will Iraq’s legacy be a resentful, mistrusted America? In the fifth of a series in which original voices from around the world exchange letters with Americans, the British broadcaster David Elstein, a libertarian conservative and anti-anti-American, expresses his dismay over recent United States foreign policy to the Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer.

Can America be good as well as great? In the fourth of our Letters to Americans series, Antara Dev Sen of India’s “The Little Magazine” writes to Dinesh D’Souza, author of “What’s so great about America”.

Is America its own biggest enemy? In the third of our Letters to Americans series, Harun Hassan, whose life was transformed by American intervention in Somalia, writes to Michael Maren, a journalist he befriended there.

Does America need friends? In the second of a new series in which original voices from around the world exchange letters with Americans, Will Hutton, British author of “A Declaration of Interdependence: why America should join the world”, writes to the anti-tax, small-government crusader Grover Norquist.

Can America combine power with modesty? In the first in a new series in which original voices from around the world exchange letters with Americans, the leader of the Chinese democracy movement Wei Jingsheng writes to Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton.