The United States of Oddity: Madeleine Schwartz on How the World Sees America at 250

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody, it's July the 1st, 2026, although I think I'm going to run this on Independence Day in three days on July 4th, 2026, when America's celebrating its 250th year anniversary. Rather than looking internally on July 4th, I thought we might reverse the angle, so to speak, or reverse the lens. Where is America seen around the world? There's a fascinating new book out. It's called How We See It, The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. It's a collection of essays by Writers on the Dial, a new magazine which is edited out of Paris. The editor of that magazine is our guest today, Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine, congratulations on the new book. I know it's a bestseller, so you must be thrilled with that.

**Madeleine Schwartz** (1:25)
Well, we're very pleased. Bestseller, I don't know, but it's doing quite well, and I've just come back from a three-week tour around the United States to talk about it, and people are really curious because I think, as you say, it's the 250th anniversary of the United States. There's a lot of talk about what that means internally to the US.
But of course, many people are seeing how much our foreign policy is changing and how much the world's idea of America is changing, and this book is really an opportunity to talk about that.

**Andrew Keen** (2:00)
Tell me about yourself, Madeleine. You sound to me American, although before we went live, you're talking to me from Paris, and I know you have some French background too. Did you grow up in the US?

**Madeleine Schwartz** (2:11)
I grew up mostly in the US, though. My mom is American and my father is French, and they split when I was just a baby. I spent my childhood going from one place to the other, which was a very early introduction into the world of being a foreign correspondent and how important it is for people from different places to actually know how to talk to each other.
I now live in France. I've been based here for six years as an adult, almost six years, though, of course, I'm in the US all the time.

**Andrew Keen** (2:37)
Do you miss America?

**Madeleine Schwartz** (2:40)
That's a difficult question to answer, and I think one of the things that we really got to in this book was the extraordinary sense of ambivalence that so much of the world has about the United States, especially at this moment, and ambivalence that I think in some sense it's almost hard for people within the United States to really grapple with, and an area in which this kind of outsider perspective is so important, and that is an ambivalence that really comes through in the pages of our book.

**Andrew Keen** (3:15)
What do you mean by ambivalence? Is it love-hate? Is it most people around the world aren't quite sure what to make of America? Do they trust themselves in what they're seeing?

**Madeleine Schwartz** (3:26)
Yeah. One of the things that we tried to do in this book, which I'll just show off here for your audience, so it's 12 different essays from around the world, from places as varied as Argentina, Ukraine, South Africa, Canada. Each of the essays really takes on a different perspective. We didn't want it to be a book that was solely or primarily about Trump, but rather a book that tried to explain or at least ask the question of how we got to this moment. Each of the essays is very distinct.
But one of the things that comes through, I think, in a lot of the pieces that we ran is a sense that the United States, at the one hand, considers itself a purveyor of hope and democracy around the world. I think that's how many Americans would like to think of the United States. Yet at the other hand, is a vast imperial and economic power, and one which dictates how much of the world lives their lives, much to those people's chagrin or frustration. A lot of what the different writers of the book get at is this tension about the way in which the United States has shaped the rest of the world, often in ways that I think many Americans would not even be aware of.

**Andrew Keen** (4:53)
Madeleine, we've done many shows on this subject, and there seems to be some disagreement both amongst Americans and people watching America about whether America is a different kind of superpower. It clearly is a superpower, for better or worse. It was the dominant power in the world for a while, maybe now shares the stage with China. But do you get a sense, and the writers on The Dial, the contributors to How We See It, do you see America as a different kind of superpower?