America's post-cold-war pre-eminence — and the sudden visibility of that pre-eminence — complicates our attempts to win friends. People already ambivalent about encroaching American culture and commerce can increasingly see affluent America itself via video. Masses that have long felt bitterly toward the rich in their own nations can transfer some antipathy to their new next-door neighbors, us: the globalization of resentment.

In sum, by the late 90's America was becoming a more natural target for ill will, even as its national security rested increasingly on good will. More than ever, we needed a leader of diplomatic sensibility, keenly attuned to the hopes and fears of diverse peoples, willing to help other nations address their priorities.

And in walked . . . George W. Bush. His alleged failures in this regard have been so thoroughly discussed that we can save time by evoking them with keywords: "crusade," "evil," Kyoto, Iraq, Bolton, Geneva Convention and so on. There's no proving Sweig's contention that Bush's "policies and nonpolicies . . . stripped bare the latent structural anti-American animus that had accumulated over time," but Kohut's Pew Research Center polls show that global opinion of the United States has plummeted under Bush — not just since its unnatural post-9/11 high, but since he took office.

And this time it's personal. Only a few years ago, anti-Americanism focused on government policies; the world "held Americans in higher esteem than America," Kohut and Stokes note. But foreigners are "increasingly equating the U.S. people with the U.S. government."

Kohut and Stokes argue, in effect, that these foreigners are confused, that Americans aren't in the grips of the offensive exceptionalism lately exhibited by their government. According to the polls, "the American people, as opposed to some of their leaders, seek no converts to their ideology." And they are not "cultural imperialists." Maybe not. But this reserve seems grounded less in humility (60 percent of Americans consider their culture "superior to others") than in apathy. Americans, Kohut and Stokes write, tend "to downplay the importance of America's relationship to other nations . . . to be indifferent to global issues . . . to lack enthusiasm for multinational efforts and institutions" and in general to have "an inattentive self-centeredness unmindful of their country's deepening linkages with other countries."

In other words: We're not obnoxiously evangelistic, just obnoxiously self-involved. So even if Bush doesn't reflect the real America, and is replaced by someone who does, we'll still be in trouble. At least, we'll be in trouble if much of the problem is indeed, as Sweig argues, the longstanding "near inability of the United States to see its power from the perspective of the powerless." Changing that will require not a leader worthy of the people, but a leader willing to lead the people.

Robert Wright
"They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us"
New York Times Book Review (5/14/2006)

[review of Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century
by Julia E. Sweig, and
America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked
by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes]

Update: The latest Pew survey on global attitudes is here.

Anti-Americanism in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which surged as a result of the U.S. war in Iraq, shows modest signs of abating. But the United States remains broadly disliked in most countries surveyed, and the opinion of the American people is not as positive as it once was. The magnitude of America's image problem is such that even popular U.S. policies have done little to repair it.

Restoring U.S. prestige is going to be a decades-long project.