CHAPTER 2

THE ROOTS OF RESENTMENT

One month after the September 11 attacks (and more than a year before the invasion of Iraq), President George W. Bush told a prime-time news conference that he was surprised to learn that there was “vitriolic hatred” of America in other parts of the world. Bush said he was “amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us…. like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are.” To address the problem, the president concluded, “We’ve got to do a better job of making our case.”¹

Bush’s comments undoubtedly struck a resonant chord with most of his listeners, because Americans tend to see their country as a positive force in the world. According to former President Bill Clinton, for example, the United States is a “beacon of hope to peoples around the world,” and “indispensable to the forging of stable political relations.”² This self-congratulatory view of America’s global role is routinely echoed by scholars and pundits alike, thereby reinforcing Americans’ sense of their own benevolent global role. According to Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, for example, U.S. primacy is central “to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.”3 Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer calls U.S. power “the landmine between barbarism and civilization,” and historian Niall Ferguson suggests that “the alternative to a single superpower is not a multilateral utopia, but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age.”⁴

Thus, U.S. leaders, scholars, and public intellectuals routinely cast U.S. primacy in a favorable light and justify U.S. involvement overseas by pointing to the benefits it brings to the United States and to others. Not surprisingly, most Americans view U.S. primacy in equally favorable terms. According to the World Values Survey, for example, more than 70 percent of U.S. citizens declare themselves to be “very proud” to be Americans (by comparison, less than half the people in countries such as France, Great Britain, Italy, or the Netherlands say they are “very proud” of their own nationality), and the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 79 percent of all Americans believe it is good “that American ideas and customs are spreading around the world.”⁵ Similarly, a 2001 survey of U.S. opinion leaders reported that over half of them believe that the United States is popular because it “does a lot of good around the world,” and nearly 80 percent of U.S. citizens believe that the United States does either the “right amount” or “too much” to help solve global problems.⁶

Yet the rest of the world does not see U.S. primacy in quite the same way. On the one hand, people around the world admire American democracy, respect America’s scientific and technological achievements, and regard the United States as a “land of opportunity.”⁷ But on the other hand, the percentage of foreign populations with a “favorable view” of the United States has plummeted since 1999. As Table 1 shows, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 exacerbated these trends, but the decline was already underway before the war.

In other words, there is a broad gap between how Americans perceive the U.S. role in the world and how that role is understood by others. In November/December 2001, for example, 70 percent of a select group of U.S. opinion leaders believed that U.S. foreign policy was “taking the interests of its partners into account” in conducting the war on terrorism. When the same question was asked of a group of opinion leaders from ten other countries, however, only one-third of their foreign counterparts shared this view.⁸ Similarly, two-thirds of Americans believe the “war on terrorism” is a sincere effort to address this threat, but, as Table 3 shows, citizens of other countries are much more likely than Americans to attribute U.S. conduct in the war on terrorism to a variety of selfish motives.⁹

TABLE 1

Percent with a “Favorable” Image of the United States

	2000	2002	3/2003	5/2003	3/2004
Canada	71	72	—	63	—
Great Britain	82	75	48	70	58
Italy	76	70	34	60	—
France	62	63	31	43	37
Germany	78	61	25	45	38
Spain	—	—	14	36	—
Poland	86	79	50	—	—
Russia	37	61	28	36	—
Morocco	77	—	—	27	27
Lebanon	35	—	—	27	—
Turkey	52	30	12	15	30
Jordan	25	—	—	1	5
Pakistan	23	10	—	13	21
Egypt	—	6	—	13	—
Brazil	—	52	—	34	—
Indonesia	75	61	—	15	—
South Korea	58	53	—	46	—
Palestinian Authority	—	14	—	1	—
Nigeria	—	77	—	61	—

Sources: “What the World Thinks in 2002,” December 4, 2002; “Views of a Changing World, June 2003”; “Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists,” March 16, 2004. All from Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, available at www.people-press.org.

TABLE 2

How Do You View U.S. Influence in the World?

	Mainly Positive	Mainly Negative	Depends/Don’t Know
Argentina	19 percent	55 percent	26 percent
Germany	27	54	19
Russia	16	63	21
Canada	34	60	6
Mexico	11	57	32
France	38	54	8
Australia	40	52	8
Indonesia	38	51	11
Brazil	42	51	7
Chile	29	50	21
Great Britain	44	50	6
Lebanon	33	49	18
South Korea	52	45	3
China	40	42	18
Italy	49	40	11
South Africa	56	35	9
Japan	24	31	45
India	54	30	16
Poland	52	21	27
Philippines	88	9	3

Source: BBC World Service and Global Poll Research Partners, January 19, 2005.

TABLE 3

“Why Do You Think the U.S. Is Conducting
the War on Terrorism?”

(Percent answering “yes” to each alternative)

Country	To Control Mideast Oil?	To Dominate the World?	To Target Unfriendly Muslim Governments?	To Protect Israel?
United States	18	13	13	11
Great Britain	33	24	21	19
Russia	51	44	25	11
France	58	53	44	23
Germany	60	47	40	30
Pakistan	54	55	51	44
Turkey	64	61	47	45
Morocco	63	60	46	54
Jordan	71	61	53	70

Source: “Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists,” March 16, 2004. Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, available at www.people-press.org.

Other surveys of mass opinion reveal a similar gulf between how others see the United States and how Americans see themselves. As shown in Table 4, more than 70 percent of Americans believe that U.S. foreign policy takes into account the interests of others either “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” but citizens in most other countries are more likely to say that U.S. foreign policy considers the interests of others “not much” or “not at all.”10 Similarly, in 2003, over 60 percent of the U.S. population approved of President George W. Bush’s handling of international policy, but only 30 percent of Europeans surveyed agreed.¹¹ As Table 5 reveals, there is also an entirely predictable gap between U.S. and European views on the desirability of America’s being the world’s only superpower.

TABLE 4

“Does U.S. Foreign Policy Consider Interests of Others?”

Country	Yes (Great Deal + Fair Amount)		No (Not Much + Not At All)
	2002	2004	2002	2004
United States	75 percent	70 percent	25 percent	27 percent
Great Britain	44	36	55	61
France	21	14	76	84
Germany	32	29	66	69
Pakistan	23	18	62	48
Russia	22	20	71	73
Turkey	9	14	86	79
Jordan	28	16	71	77
Morocco	31	34	63	57

Sources: “What the World Thinks in 2002,” and “Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists.” Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC, available at www.people-press.org.

Nor is this pattern confined to Europe. Bush’s overall approval rating in the United States was 61 percent in March 2004, but his scores in other countries were dramatically lower. Indeed, Bush’s standing lagged well behind that of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, Jordan, and Morocco.12 And in Iraq, 35 percent of the population held a “favorable” or “very favorable” view of bin Laden in August 2003, and 50 percent said they believed the United States would probably “hurt Iraq” over the next five years. By April 2004, in fact, a Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll reported that 59 percent of Iraqis thought U.S. military actions in Iraq were “unjustified,” and a survey commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004 found that 80 percent of Iraqis had “no confidence” in the ability of the U.S.-led coalition to improve the situation in their country.¹³

ITABLE 5

“In Thinking About International Affairs, Which Statement Comes Closer to Your Position About the United States and the European Union?”

Country	U.S. Should Remain Only Superpower	EU Should Become Superpower
United States	42 percent	37 percent
Great Britain	22	52
France	5	89
Germany	8	70
Netherlands	9	65
Italy	5	80
Poland	10	63
Portugal	7	80

Source: Transatlantic Trends, German Marshall Fund of the United States, June 2003. Survey conducted June 2003.

In short, Americans see their country as a positive force in the world, but the rest of the world is decidedly ambivalent. The United States does have vocal defenders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair (who has publicly denounced anti-Americanism as a “foolish indulgence”), but it also has more than its share of prominent and equally vocal critics.14 Indian author Arundhati Roy explained the September 11 attacks by saying, “American foreign policy has created a huge, simmering reservoir of resentment”; novelist John le Carré greeted the war on Iraq by declaring in The Times (London), “The United States has gone mad”; and playwright Harold Pinter judged the United States to be “beyond reason” and likened it to Nazi Germany.15 Nobel Prize–winning German author Günter Grass warned, “This man Bush is a danger to his own country”; the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, called Bush “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen”; and physicist Stephen Hawking told a London rally that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a “war crime” based on “lies.”¹⁶

The U.S. image is especially bleak in the Arab and Islamic world. A June 2004 survey of six Arab countries confirmed that these populations hold overwhelmingly negative views of the U.S. role in the world, despite somewhat positive attitudes toward U.S. science and technology, American movies and TV, and even the American people themselves. In particular, fewer than 10 percent of those surveyed in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have favorable views of U.S. policy toward the Arabs in general, the Palestinians, the war on terrorism, and Iraq.¹⁷ And when asked to identify their “first thought” when America is mentioned, the most common response in Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia was “unfair foreign policy.”¹⁸

Such sentiments are not confined to the Arab and Islamic world, however. Indeed, they can now be found in every corner of the globe, including America’s long-standing democratic allies. As The Economist concluded in February 2003, “There exists a widening gulf of incomprehension between the people of America and the peoples of Europe.”¹⁹ In November 2003, in fact, 53 percent of Europeans thought the United States had a “negative role” on “peace in the world,” and only 27 percent thought the U.S. role was positive.²⁰

What is going on here? If U.S. primacy is a force for good in the world—as U.S. leaders proclaim and Americans overwhelmingly believe—then why don’t other countries recognize this? Is it simple envy, the product of irrational hatreds, or a prudent and predictable reaction to the asymmetry of power in Washington’s hands?

For some commentators, the problem is “who we are.” According to President Bush, “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”21 Or, as he later explained, “The terrorists who attacked our country on September the 11th, 2001 were not protesting our policies. They were protesting our existence. Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornet’s nest. But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already. If America were not fighting terrorists in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere, what would these thousands of killers do, suddenly begin leading productive lives of service and charity?”²² From this perspective, opposition to the United States is an inevitable, and thus unavoidable, reaction either to the concentration of power in U.S. hands or the specific political and cultural values that the United States represents. And if that were the whole story, there would be little the United States could do about it.

Other observers blame anti-Americanism primarily on “what we do.” It is not just U.S. power or U.S. values, it is also the specific ways that U.S. power is used and the specific ways that U.S. leaders justify America’s global role. Thus, the late author Susan Sontag saw September 11 as a direct response (however reprehensible) to America’s own actions, asking, “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”²³ Of course, if America’s actions are largely responsible for the rising tide of resentment, then it might be possible to reduce these tendencies by using U.S. power differently, and by adopting a different approach to dealing with the rest of the world.²⁴

Which is it? The answer (unfortunately) is: “Both.” American power does worry friends and foes alike, and America’s values can be a source of friction as well as admiration. But that is not the most important part of the story. Opposition to the United States is driven primarily by the ways that the United States uses its power, both in the past and at present, and especially when the United States acts in an overweening or hypocritical fashion.

The remainder of this chapter explores these issues in greater detail, focusing on two main themes. I begin by asking why other societies might fear, resent, or hate us for “what we are,” and then consider why such attitudes are affected even more by “what we do.” I then explain why Americans often fail to understand these tendencies. Why do we often underestimate the degree of foreign resentment, and why do we overlook our own role in generating it?

“They Fear (or Hate or Resent) Us for What We Are”

Fear of American Power

The end of the Cold War altered many key features of world politics, but it did not affect the essential nature of the international system. States still live in a condition of anarchy, where there is no world government to protect them from each other. In particular, each state must try to provide its own security as best it can. As a result, states are prone to worry if one state becomes more powerful than the rest, and especially if it becomes so strong that it can impose its will with impunity.25 Winston Churchill’s summary of British foreign policy captures the logic of this position perfectly: “For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent. . . . [W]e always took the harder course, joined with the less strong powers, and thus defeated the Continental military tyrant whoever he was.”²⁶ The same principle has governed U.S. grand strategy since its rise to Great Power status: U.S. leaders have consistently opposed any state that threatened to establish regional hegemony in Europe or Asia, so as to avoid facing a rival power with capabilities comparable to America’s own.²⁷

From this perspective, it is easy to understand why other states worry about U.S. primacy. They worry because the United States is strong enough to act pretty much as it wishes, and other states cannot be sure that Washington will not use its immense power to threaten their own interests. Back in 2000, for example, the official Russian National Security Concept warned of “attempts to create an international relations structure based on domination by developed Western countries … under U.S. leadership and designed for unilateral solutions (including the use of military force) to key issues in world politics.”28 More recently, the Bush administration’s emphasis on “preemption” was greeted by a chorus of foreign criticism, such as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s comment that “a world order in which the national interests of the strongest power is the criterion for military action simply cannot work.”²⁹

“But wait,” many Americans would respond, “we are a peace-loving country that uses its power to advance the greater good of humankind.” Even more than most Great Powers, America’s faith in its own rectitude leads both its leaders and its citizens to discount the possibility that others might find U.S. power worrisome or threatening. Neoconservative Richard Perle believes that “U.S. power is always potentially a source for good in the world,” and columnist Charles Krauthammer declares that what protects civilization from barbarism “is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power—wielded, if necessary, unilaterally. If necessary, preemptively.”³⁰ Not to be outdone, Newsweek diplomatic correspondent Michael Hirsh concludes that, “for all its fumbling, the role played by the United States is the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history.”³¹ Or, as George W. Bush remarked during the 2000 presidential campaign, “The United States has a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.”³² Who could disagree with that? Americans think their noble aims are apparent to all, which means that only evil or aggressive regimes have any reason to fear American power.

There are at least four problems with this defense of U.S. primacy, however. First, as discussed in greater detail below, the U.S. record is not as pure as many Americans believe. The United States has used its power to harm other countries in the past—including states that were not especially evil or aggressive—and other states are well aware of this fact. Pious declarations of American virtue may find a receptive audience at home, but they are unlikely to convince those who have felt the sharp end of U.S. power themselves.

Second, other states worry about U.S. power because they know that conflicts of interest will inevitably arise. Because each state has a different endowment of resources, a unique geographic location, and its own particular history, each inevitably has somewhat different preferences on most issues. Landlocked countries and maritime powers have different views about the Law of the Sea, just as upwind and downwind countries generally have different interests on the issue of acid rain. Wealthy industrial powers want to lower barriers to trade in manufactured goods and services; developing countries want to reduce tariffs on agricultural products and textiles. States with different historical and cultural traditions disagree about human rights. In world politics, conflicts of interest are inescapable. And when they occur, stronger states are more likely to get their way and weaker states are more likely to have to adjust. In short, other countries dislike U.S. primacy for the same reason that Americans prefer it: on balance, weaker states have to adjust their behavior to the preferences of more powerful states. No matter how hard U.S. leaders try to reassure other states about America’s benevolent intentions, therefore, other states are going to worry about American power.

Third, even if it were true that the United States had consistently acted for the greater good in the past, other states do not know how the United States will behave in the future. No state can know what another state might choose to do, which means that a large imbalance of power in anyone’s favor will always be daunting to others. The United States may have done less harm per unit of power than other major powers have, but the rest of the world cannot be sure that it will remain benevolent, especially when its position of primacy gives it unprecedented freedom of action. As a senior Chinese diplomat put it in 2000, “How can we base our own national security on your assurances of good will?” Or as Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash noted in April 2002: “The problem with American power is not that it is American. The problem is simply the power. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power.”33

“But the United States is a democracy,” some Americans might insist, “and democracies don’t fight each other. Tyrants and dictators may have reason to fear us, but our fellow democracies share the same ideals and need not worry about our dominance.” The claim that “democracies don’t fight each other” may be empirically correct (though it remains controversial among scholars of international relations), but it does not mean that other states have no reason to fear U.S. power. Not every state is a democracy, for one thing, and as John M. Owen and Ido Oren have shown, how the United States deals with other states depends in large part on whether we perceive them to be democratic or not.³⁴ Moreover, even states that can feel confident the United States will not attack them still have reason to worry about the concentration of power in American hands. Britain, France, and Israel did not think the United States was going to attack them during the Suez War of 1956, for example, but U.S. economic and diplomatic pressure still forced them into a humiliating withdrawal from the territories they had conquered.³⁵ Nor did the United States threaten to use military force when it abandoned the gold standard in 1971 and destroyed the Bretton Woods monetary order, but it did use its superior economic position to force other states to bear the costs of this shift.

“Not so fast,” a reader familiar with contemporary social-science theory might counter. “Democratic leaders can also make more credible promises than authoritarian leaders can, because their citizens are more likely to remove them from power if they renege on their commitments.” If so, then other states need not worry that the United States will become aggressive in the future, because U.S. leaders cannot renege on prior pledges of restraint without incurring significant domestic political costs.36 Some scholars also maintain that U.S. primacy is more acceptable to other states because the United States has consciously chosen to “bind” itself within key international institutions (such as NATO), in effect exercising self-restraint in order to reassure others about its benevolent intentions.³⁷ Both arguments imply that other states need not worry that U.S. power would be used in harmful ways—either because U.S. leaders will remain bound by past promises or because U.S. leaders will recognize that the long-term benefits of multilateral cooperation will outweigh any short-term gains from unilateral action.

These features may diminish concerns about U.S. power somewhat, but they cannot eliminate them. As we saw in the previous chapter, the United States already dominates institutions such as NATO and the World Bank, which makes them at best a weak constraint on its own freedom of action. And as discussed at length in chapter 3, efforts to “bind” the United States within a web of institutional ties have generally failed, save in certain specialized areas where the U.S. advantage is less pronounced. Similarly, the alleged ability of democracies to make more credible commitments did not prevent the United States from abandoning the gold standard in 1971 or abrogating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in the fall of 2001, to the consternation of many long-standing allies. Bill Clinton signed the convention establishing the International Criminal Court, but George Bush removed the U.S. “signature” a few months later. Democracies may be less arbitrary or fickle than their authoritarian counterparts, but they can still change their minds. After all, isn’t that why they hold elections?

There is a final reason why no state can be entirely comfortable with the concentration of power in the hands of the United States. Even if the United States were consistently trying to act for the general good of mankind, its policies can still do considerable damage inadvertently. Assurances about America’s benevolent intentions may be of little value if actions undertaken for noble reasons end up hurting others by accident. After all, the United States did not intend to destabilize Cambodia in the early 1970s, but its intervention there helped pave the way for the Khmer Rouge and thus contributed indirectly to a massive genocide. The United States surely did not intend its support for the Afghan mujaheddin to lead to creation of a global network of Islamic terrorists, but that is in fact what happened. The Bush administration was obviously not trying to get al Qaeda to attack the Madrid subway system when it courted Spanish support for the war in Iraq, but that was still one of the unintended effects of its policies.

Less dramatically, U.S. legislators are not actively seeking to stifle third-world development or put foreigners out of work when they erect protectionist tariffs against foreign textiles or extend agricultural subsidies to American farmers; they are simply trying to protect jobs in their home districts and enhance their own prospects for reelection. But the effect on developing countries is no different than if they had acted with deliberate malice.

Looking ahead, if U.S. efforts to transform the Middle East end up destabilizing key oil producers and driving up world oil prices, then every oil-importing country would suffer, even though the United States did not mean to harm them. If the United States were to launch a preventive war against North Korea, or attempt a surgical strike against its nuclear production facilities, this action could trigger a destructive war on the Korean Peninsula and do massive damage to South Korea and possibly Japan. But these results would not have been our intention, merely a tragic side effect.

The point should be clear. The conduct of foreign policy is rife with unintended consequences, and the bigger you are and the more freedom of action you enjoy, the more damage you can cause even if you don’t mean to do it.38 The late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau captured the problem perfectly some years ago, when he remarked that living next to the United States was “like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, … one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”39 This problem may be especially acute for neighboring states like Canada, but America’s dominant position means that its “twitches and grunts” are now felt in every corner of the globe. Even if other countries were convinced that the United States was in fact uniquely virtuous and acting only for the greater good, they would still have good reasons to worry about how America was going to use its power. At the very least, the rest of the world would be foolish to assume that the United States would never act in ways that could harm them.

Resistance to American Values

The United States is not just the world’s strongest country, of course. It is also a society with a distinct set of political values and institutions and a singular vision of its historic world role. As the world’s dominant economic and military power, the United States casts a large cultural shadow. In contrast to some other Great Powers (such as the former Soviet Union), U.S. society is also adept at producing cultural icons with enormous worldwide appeal—think of Coca-Cola, Michael Jordan, Hollywood movies, or television—as well as institutions of higher education that serve as powerful intellectual beacons.

As discussed in chapter 1, the appeal of American ideals and the long shadow cast by American culture reinforces America’s position of primacy. Unfortunately, America’s political values and cultural products are not universally appealing. The ideals that America stands for, and the cultural practices that it transmits to the rest of the world, can also be a powerful source of anti-American sentiment, especially when the global balance of power is so heavily weighted in America’s favor.

At one extreme, anti-Americanism arises from the belief that American society and culture are inherently evil or immoral. Religious fundamentalists and other extremists condemn the hedonism and sexual explicitness of American popular culture and point to its high rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock parenting, and other social ills. Thus, when the late Sayyid Qutb, a leading intellectual of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and a continuing influence on today’s Islamic radicals, visited the United States in the late 1940s, he was repelled by what he saw as America’s individualism, commercial greed, and sexual licentiousness. As he put it, “Humanity today is living in a large brothel. . . . One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests. . . . Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts, and the media!”40 More recently, Osama bin Laden has sought to capitalize on similar feelings of revulsion by denouncing the United States for “gambling,” for “practicing the trade of sex in all its forms,” for “exploiting women like consumer products,” and for “producing, trading and using intoxicants and drugs,” not to mention President Clinton’s “immoral acts” in the Oval Office.⁴¹ Such critiques are not confined to foreign radicals, of course; homegrown fundamentalists also regard contemporary American society as morally bankrupt and in need of a radical religious revival.⁴²

Less extreme versions of this same tendency reject the individualism, materialism, and glorification of violence in American popular culture, as well as some of the more obvious failings of the American social and political system. In particular, foreign critics point to the comparatively high levels of violent crime in the United States, an incarceration rate that is significantly higher than in other industrial democracies, and its continued reliance upon the death penalty. As one French commentator explains it, “In European eyes, America is still a barbaric country, a Wild West that does not know how to police its population and control its judges and sheriffs.”⁴³

Paradoxically, concerns about U.S. primacy also arise from the fear that American culture is too attractive, and that the spread of American values will extinguish other ways of life. Here the concern is not that U.S. culture is inherently repellent; rather, the concern is that it is so seductive that it will eventually replace existing cultural systems. When the French worry about the spread of English, fast food, or Walt Disney, or when developing countries complain about “cultural genocide,” they are expressing a fear that the dynamic thrust of American norms, business practices, and cultural products will eventually compromise their own cultural identity. As the Pew Global Attitudes Survey noted in 2002, “Publics in every European country surveyed except Bulgaria are resentful of the American cultural intrusion in their country…. In the Middle East, overwhelming majorities in every country except Uzbekistan have a negative impression of American ideas and customs. . . . The sentiment also appears throughout Latin America and Asia (with the exception of Japan and the Philippines).”44

In these cases, opposition to the United States does not necessarily arise from a direct concern about its power. Rather, the common thread in these different types of anti-Americanism is an aversion to specific American political and social values and a desire to contain— or, in some cases, reverse—their spread.

Upon reflection, concerns about the contagious spread of U.S. values and practices should not surprise us. The U.S. political system is based on a set of universal claims about individual rights and human liberty, claims that by definition transcend the borders of existing states. Moreover, U.S. leaders have long declared the promotion of these ideals to be a fundamental U.S. interest. In 1989, for example, President George H. W. Bush declared, “Nothing can stand in the way of freedom’s march,” and he later proclaimed, “No society, no continent, should be disqualified from sharing the ideals of human liberty.”⁴⁵ Some ten years later, Bush’s son began his own National Security Strategy by declaring that “these values of freedom are right and true for all people everywhere.” Thus, the United States openly identifies itself as a universal model for all societies and sees itself as a superior alternative to all nonliberal social orders.⁴⁶

Like other universal ideologies, therefore, American liberalism threatens the legitimacy of alternative social orders merely by existing.47 Even if the United States did not try to spread its ideals abroad, other states would still worry that the ideas might spread spontaneously. The stronger and more successful the United States is, the longer the shadow it will cast on others and the more illiberal states will fear the power of the U.S. example.⁴⁸

Furthermore, the United States has not been content to be merely a “shining city on a hill.” Instead, the United States actively seeks to spread its ideals abroad, sometimes with a vengeance. The combination of a universalist political philosophy and a strong evangelical streak is understandable, for if one genuinely believes that one’s own political principles are universally valid, then it is easy to conclude that one has an obligation to carry them to others. John Quincy Adams may have famously warned Americans not to venture abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” but he was writing when the United States was still a weak and isolated power whose survival as an independent country was far from certain.⁴⁹ American leaders have long seen the United States as a model for the rest of the world, and their ambitions have grown as U.S. power has increased. Upon joining the ranks of the other Great Powers, the United States sought to combine the pursuit of power with the loftier goal of recasting the world in America’s image.⁵⁰ Between 1900 and 2000, in fact, the United States used force to impose democratic institutions on other countries at least twenty-five separate times, albeit with varying degrees of success.⁵¹

U.S. power is now unmatched, and the belief that primacy should be used to promote democratic ideals enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. Thus, neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan ask, “What’s wrong with dominance in the service of sound principles and high ideals?” and the Bush administration declares that “the great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.”⁵²

Nor is this ambition confined to conservative Republicans. The Clinton administration also advocated using U.S. power to “enlarge” the sphere of democratic rule, and contemporary liberals remain as committed to this goal as their neoconservative counterparts. Thus, Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace believes U.S. foreign policy should be guided by a “Liberty Doctrine,” which in turn requires the United States to maintain its current position of primacy. “To effectively promote liberty abroad over the long haul,” he writes, “the United States must maintain its overwhelming military advantage over the rest of the world.”53

Unfortunately, the combination of great power, universal principles, and a bipartisan consensus in favor of imposing these principles on others is bound to be alarming to other countries, including some of our fellow democracies. Even societies that admire certain U.S. values may not want to adopt all of them—and especially not at the point of a gun. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, for example, the world’s industrial democracies share similar commitments to individual rights and the rule of law, and many of their citizens see the United States as a “land of opportunity” and admire many of its achievements. Yet these same populations oppose the spread of American-style democracy and business practices and regard the less-admirable features of American society with a combination of fear and disdain. In particular, although European publics (and especially European elites) clearly believe “globalization” is a good thing, sizable majorities reject the U.S. economic system as “too inequitable” to be a good model for their own countries. According to a 2002 study by the State Department’s Office of Research, “Half or more in Britain, France, Germany and Italy say that the U.S. economic system ‘neglects too many social problems because of a lack of job security and few employment benefits for many workers.’”⁵⁴ Similarly, a Eurobarometer survey in 2003 showed that French, German, and British citizens by overwhelming margins rejected “copying the American economic model.” There are many “varieties of democratic capitalism” in the world today, and the inhabitants of other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries want to keep it that way.55

Equally important, much of the world is not democratic at all. For these regimes, the combination of preponderant power and ideological zeal that now drives U.S. foreign policy is undoubtedly alarming. When President George W. Bush declares that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture,” he is in effect saying that the United States is committed to making the whole world move toward the American vision of an ideal social order.⁵⁶ And when his administration justifies regime change in Iraq by claiming that it will spark a wave of democratic transformation throughout the Middle East, it is in effect declaring that all nondemocracies are illegitimate and deserve to be replaced.⁵⁷ Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s “Greater Middle East Initiative”—a program intended to promote democracy and good governance—provoked a decidedly negative reaction in the Arab world when it was announced in the spring of 2004. Jordan’s foreign minister declared that “our objective is for this document never to see the light,” and a columnist in Egypt’s semiofficial newspaper, al-Ahram, commented that “there is no difference between what was said by the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch colonizers … and what the modern colonial empires are saying.”⁵⁸ Indeed, it would be astonishing if the leaders of nondemocratic states did not view America’s efforts to spread democracy as an imminent threat to their own positions.

It is hardly wrong, of course, for Americans to favor liberty, democracy, free markets, the rule of law, or the vibrant diversity of American cultural life. Nor is it necessarily wrong for the United States to use its power to encourage others to adopt these ideas. But the truths that Americans hold to be “self-evident” are not “self-evident” elsewhere. This is one more reason why American power worries others: Not only can they not be sure what we are going to do with it, some of the things we say we intend to do are deeply troubling.

Is It “What We Are” or “What We Stand For”?

At this point, it may be tempting to conclude that foreign hostility is simply unavoidable, either because other states are worried about American power or because they are hostile to American ideals. In this view, anti-Americanism is an inescapable part of being the dominant global power. Thus, the Pentagon’s 2005 National Defense Strategy acknowledges that America’s “leading position in world affairs will continue to breed unease, a degree of resentment, and resistence,” and neoconservative pundit Max Boot writes that “resentment comes with the territory.”59

As one would expect, this interpretation is popular among those who believe the United States should pursue an ambitious global role, as well as those who believe the United States should pay little attention to the concerns of other countries. Thus, Robert Kagan and William Kristol write that “the main issue of contention between the United States and most of those who express opposition to its hegemony is not American ‘arrogance.’ It is the inescapable reality of American power in all its forms.”⁶⁰ Similarly, historian Bernard Lewis maintains that “Muslim rage” is a response to the past failures of the Islamic world, rather than a reaction either to past Western actions or current U.S. policies.⁶¹ Neoconservative Arabist Fouad Ajami offers much the same view, suggesting that anti-Americanism is the “ ‘road rage’ of a thwarted Arab world—the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds,” and he recommends that “there is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region.”⁶² If anti-American extremism is primarily a reaction to perceived weakness and past humiliation, then the United States should do what it thinks is right and not worry very much about whether the rest of the world agrees.⁶³

A milder version of the same argument sees European opposition to American unilateralism (and especially its opposition to preventive wars in places like Iraq) as a reflection of European resentment at their own impotence and envy for America’s current global dominance. This explanation was a central theme of Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, which famously claimed, “Americans are from Mars; Europeans from Venus.” Or as columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, Europeans who object to the active use of U.S. power are part of an “axis of petulance … the real problem is their irrelevance.”64 These arguments carry an obvious implication: If there is nothing the United States can do to alleviate foreign hostility, why try?

As the previous pages have suggested, there is a grain of truth in these arguments. Some degree of foreign opposition to U.S. primacy is a reaction to America’s dominant material position and the alien and potentially threatening effects of American values and culture. Such attitudes are reinforced by the destabilizing effects of globalization, for, as Benjamin Cohen puts it, “Globalization is seen by many as not benevolent but malign … [and] since America is identified with globalization as its patron and its principal beneficiary, that view means that America is the enemy too.”⁶⁵ To an extent, therefore, anti-Americanism is “hard-wired” into the system as long as the United States remains number one.

Yet it would be a grave error to see this as the whole story, or even the most important part.

First, this interpretation cannot explain the downward trend of the past decade, and especially the deterioration of America’s international position after 2000. The United States has been the “unipolar power” since the early 1990s (at the latest), but its international standing remained high throughout the entire decade. Although a number of foreign leaders expressed concerns about the asymmetry of power in U.S. hands, solid majorities around the world held “favorable” opinions of the United States, and both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton enjoyed good working relations with a wide array of foreign leaders. Indeed, in 2000 Clinton became only the third American to win the Charlemagne Prize, awarded annually to the individual who had made the greatest contribution to European unity.66 If U.S. power were the main source of the problem, America’s image in the world should have declined much sooner. Instead, the chief source of contemporary opposition is global reaction to specific U.S. policies—and especially the actions of the Bush administration— and is not simply a response to U.S. power or American values.

Second, the belief that it is just “who we are” ignores the testimony of some of America’s most fervent opponents. Take Osama bin Laden, for example. Although bin Laden is sometimes critical of American culture, his actions throughout his career have been inspired primarily by opposition to the specific policies of particular states. In the 1980s, he went to Afghanistan to aid the mujaheddin resistance to the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, he organized al Qaeda in response to the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf—and especially in Saudi Arabia—and in opposition to U.S. support for Israel.⁶⁷ It is not simply America’s existence that fuels his hatred. It is also his belief that the United States “has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places … , plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the [Arabian] Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.” Indeed, bin Laden emphasized in October 2004 that he and his followers were not at war against “freedom,” which is why they did not strike countries like Sweden. Rather, he attacked the United States to “punish” it for its “unjust” actions in the Middle East. His enmity, in short, is a reaction to U.S. foreign policy, and not to U.S. power per se or to America’s underlying values.⁶⁸

Bin Laden’s opposition is extreme, of course, but he is not alone. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, for example, “antipathy toward the United States is shaped more by what it does in the international arena than by what it stands for politically and economically.”69 Similarly, an authoritative study by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies,” noting further that in the eyes of the Muslim world, the “American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.”⁷⁰ According to the State Department’s Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, “Arabs and Muslims … support our values but believe that our policies do not live up to them.”⁷¹ When citizens of six Arab countries were asked if their attitude toward America was shaped by their feelings about American values or U.S. policies, “an overwhelming percentage of respondents indicated that policy played a more important role.”⁷² Or, as former Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat put it, “Most of the Arab public admires U.S. freedoms and democracy and bears no hostility to the Americans as a people. But that same public is both horrified and angered by an American foreign policy which does little, if anything, to promote similar freedoms and democracy in the Middle East.⁷³ Similarly, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has testified that “there exists a hatred [of America] never equaled in the region,” in part because Arabs “see [Israeli Prime Minister] Sharon act as he wants, without the Americans saying anything.”⁷⁴

In particular, the most violent forms of anti-American terrorism seem to be inspired primarily by reactions to U.S. actions and policies rather than by a fundamental animosity to U.S. values or culture or even U.S. power itself. For example, a 1997 study by the Defense Science Board found “a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and increased terrorist attacks on the United States.”⁷⁵ Prominent examples of these essentially reactive attacks include Libya’s hijacking of Pan Am flight 73 in September 1987 and the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and a rocket attack on U.S. military facilities in Japan in 1991. Similarly, the terrorist attack on the Madrid subway system in 2004 was not inspired by antipathy toward Spanish values or Spanish culture; it was a deliberate response to Spain’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its continued presence among the occupying forces. In other words, international terrorists have not attacked the United States or its allies because they are opposed to U.S. values, or even primarily because they are worried about U.S. power. Instead, they have targeted the United States because they oppose its global military presence and the policies that presence is supporting.76 And even here, the vast majority of terrorist groups are not attacking the United States directly; rather, they are primarily motivated by local grievances and target Americans only when U.S. power is actively engaged in their neighborhoods. It is not just “who we are,” in short, it is what we do and where we do it.⁷⁷

Third, the claim that foreign opposition stems solely from “who we are” is simply too convenient. Americans find it an appealing thesis, of course, because it absolves us of any responsibility for the fear, hatred, or resentment that others direct at the United States. In this view, it is not our fault that we are so powerful, and we have nothing for which to apologize if our democratic values pose a threat to corrupt and oppressive dictatorships around the world. The appeal of this interpretation was repeatedly demonstrated in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when government spokesmen (and especially the president) repeatedly portrayed them as an assault on “liberty,” and anyone who suggested that the attacks might also be a reaction to prior U.S. activities was likely to be condemned for being unpatriotic.⁷⁸

Unfortunately, once we embrace this explanation for foreign opposition, we cease asking how the United States can act in ways that might make its position in the world either better or worse. If they hate us solely for what we stand for, and what we stand for is basically good, then there is nothing we can or should do about it, and the only question is how we can win the inevitable struggle.

To recognize the U.S. role in generating foreign opposition is not to imply that U.S. foreign policy is necessarily wrong, and it certainly does not mean that anti-American terrorism is justified. Rather, the point is that opposition to the United States is not based solely on concerns about U.S. power and does not arise primarily from some abstract opposition to U.S. values (including its support for “freedom”). Instead, anti-Americanism is the price the United States is paying for its current global position and the specific ways it uses its power, and the real question is simply whether the benefits outweigh the costs.79

In short, anti-American attitudes and anti-American behavior are not just a defensive reaction to America’s superior power or a reflection of some fundamental rejection of U.S. values. Instead, we must also consider what the United States has done to other countries, and what it is doing today.

What the United States Has Done and What It Is Doing

Historic Grievances: The Legacy of the Past

The belief that American primacy is good for the world and should be welcomed by others rests on the claim that the United States is an unusually benevolent Great Power. According to columnist Charles Krauthammer, “The American claim to benignity is not mere selfcongratulation. We have a track record.”⁸⁰ He has a point. U.S. global leadership has produced a number of important successes, including the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, the creation of multilateral institutions for global economic management, the containment and eventual defeat of the Soviet Union (without a Great Power war), and the growing acceptance of democracy and human rights worldwide. The United States does not deserve all the credit for these events, but it surely played a major role. American power has deterred conflict on the Korean Peninsula, dampened rivalries in Europe and Asia, helped bring peace to Bosnia and Kosovo, and eased the simmering dispute between India and Pakistan. And, unlike earlier Great Powers, it has done these things without amassing a vast overseas empire and without ruling vast colonies and millions of people by force. As German foreign-affairs expert Josef Joffe put it (albeit before the invasion of Iraq): “America is a hegemon different from all its predecessors. America annoys and antagonizes, but it does not conquer.”81

Yet America’s “track record” is not perfect, and the rest of the world knows it. Even before the Cold War, the United States sometimes used force in heavy-handed and self-serving ways, although it did so primarily within its own hemisphere.⁸² During the Cold War, the United States supported armed rebels in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere, and actively worked to undermine communist rule whenever and wherever it could. Along the way, the United States helped overthrow at least nine freely elected governments, while turning a blind eye to the brutal behavior of an unsavory array of anticommunist dictators, including some of its authoritarian allies in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.⁸³ After the Cold War ended, the United States imposed a series of one-sided agreements on its defeated Cold War adversaries, fired cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan in a failed attempt to prevent future terrorist attacks, maintained crippling economic sanctions and conducted repeated air strikes against Iraq, and continued to subsidize Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It also overthrew governments in Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia, and most recently Iraq, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

Even if each of these actions were entirely defensible, this history provides fertile ground for anti-Americanism. If another country believes the United States has acted aggressively in the past—and especially if U.S. actions seemed particularly hostile or callous—then it is likely to be even more suspicious of U.S. conduct and especially worried by U.S. primacy.

This tendency may seem somewhat puzzling at first. Why should one nation care what some other nation did to it in the past? Why incur present-day costs and risks because of some unfortunate behavior long ago? Why should Armenians continue to dwell on the past crimes of the Turks? Why do Serbs obsess about their own historic misfortunes? Why can’t East Asians forget what Japan did a halfcentury ago? Why not let bygones be bygones, bury the hatchet, and move on?

There are at least two reasons why past grievances can still shape current attitudes and behavior. First, states may use another country’s past behavior as a guide to its future conduct.84 As with a mutual fund, past performance is no guarantee of how a state will act in the future. Nonetheless, other states are likely to draw inferences from past behavior in order to forecast how others are going to behave in the future. States that have behaved benevolently (or at least with a degree of restraint) will be seen in a more favorable light; those that have acted badly will be viewed with more suspicion. And governments that commit great crimes—such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan—may place their nations under a shadow of suspicion lasting for decades. Even when there are no immediate signs of revanchism, historical memories will encourage others to make sure that subsequent generations never gain the opportunity to repeat the crimes of their ancestors. Remembrance of past atrocities fueled Serb and Croat violence following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and gave nationalist leaders like Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic a potent weapon for stoking nationalist fervor.⁸⁵

Second, even if the victims do not believe that past behavior is necessarily a guide to future conduct, past crimes can also generate a desire for vengeance. This desire might be explained on purely rational grounds (i.e., states want to punish crimes against humanity in order to reinforce norms and deter similar acts in the future), but it may also arise from the desire to make the guilty parties suffer as others have suffered. A purely rational explanation for retaliation ignores the role of anger and rage: when you have wronged me, I may want to hurt you, even if doing so does nothing to deter future harm and may even add fuel to the fire. The desire for vengeance seems to have played a role in the Balkans and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and it is a key ingredient in contemporary terrorist violence.86

Iran’s troubled relationship with the United States illustrates both tendencies. As James A. Bill and others have noted, the long and intimate association between the United States and the Shah of Iran led many Iranians to believe the United States was constantly manipulating Iranian domestic politics for nefarious purposes. Even after the Shah fell, therefore, U.S. efforts to reach a modus vivendi with the revolutionary regime were hamstrung by Iranian suspicions that the United States was inherently hostile and untrustworthy. The result was a Catch-22: U.S. warnings or threats confirmed Iranian suspicions, but friendship or attempts at accommodation were regarded as duplicitous attempts to reassert U.S. control. At the same time, Iranian hostility was also fueled by genuine anger over past U.S. support for the Shah, and by a desire to undermine U.S. interests wherever possible.⁸⁷

Under what conditions will historical grievances foster hatred or resentment of the United States? The answer is not immediately obvious, because there is no clear or direct relationship between the intensity of past conflicts and the present state of U.S. relations with other countries. In the Korean War, for example, violent conflict among the United States, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China solidified existing suspicions and led to a long period of hostility. U.S. interventions in Latin America have had similar effects, helping to explain why virulent anti-American movements emerged in Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.⁸⁸

Yet other cases underscore the complex relationship between past conflict and current attitudes. The United States waged all-out war against Germany and Japan in World War II, killed tens of thousands of civilians in each society, and eventually dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Yet relations improved dramatically once the fighting was over, and these two countries have been among America’s closest allies for over half a century. The United States caused far less suffering in Iran—despite its lengthy involvement with the Shah— yet Iran has remained suspicious of the United States ever since the ouster of the Shah in 1980.

These examples show that past behavior is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence of anti-Americanism. There are at least four other conditions that will affect whether or not past U.S. behavior will be a powerful source of present-day resentments.

First, U.S. actions will provoke greater fear, hatred, and resentment when the United States uses force and when its use of violence is seen as unprovoked. As the examples of Germany and Japan suggest, other states are less likely to resent what the United States has done when they recognize that their own actions were at least partly responsible for the damage U.S. power ultimately inflicted upon them. Although many Germans and Japanese died as a result of American military action, these societies also understood that the United States was retaliating for their own acts of aggression. Although Germans and Japanese have been critical of certain U.S. actions, they do not see U.S. participation in World War II as a historic crime.89

By contrast, U.S. interventions in Latin America have generated enduring anti-American attitudes because these actions were rarely (if ever) a response to Latin American aggression against the United States. Instead of responding to a direct attack on the United States itself (or on vital U.S. interests), the United States intervened in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in order to protect U.S. business interests, to preserve U.S. political influence, or to prevent the emergence of leftist governments. Although Americans usually regarded these actions as justified, the victims of U.S. intervention saw them as unwarranted interference.

Arab and Muslim hostility toward Israel and the United States has similar origins. The Zionist movement was a response to centuries of anti-Semitism in the Christian West, and its ultimate success was partly a response to the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. The Arab inhabitants of Palestine were not responsible for European anti-Semitism or the Nazi genocide, yet it was their land that was lost when Israel was created. Moreover, the establishment of Israel involved considerable violence and atrocities on both sides, including officially sanctioned “ethnic cleansing” during the War of Independence and organized terrorist attacks by Israelis and Palestinians alike.90 Israelis (and many Americans) may regard the creation of Israel as a miraculous solution to an enduring historical problem, but Palestinian Arabs understandably resent having to pay the price for other people’s crimes.⁹¹

Second, and following from the first point, historic grievances are more likely to fester into long-term hostility when the United States either does not recognize that its actions were wrong or refuses to admit that its policies have harmed others. America’s troubled relationship with Iran was not helped, for example, when President George H. W. Bush responded to the mistaken U.S. downing of an Iranian airliner in July 1988 by saying, “I will never apologize for the United States of America—I don’t care what the facts are.”⁹² Failure to acknowledge past crimes is troubling to others in part because it implies that the victims do not merit an apology; it compounds the original injury by treating the victims with contempt. Equally important, failure to acknowledge past sins reinforces the fear that these crimes will be repeated. When a state does not admit that it did something wrong, those to whom the wrong was done will rightly conclude that the transgressor either does not know what proper behavior is or does not care whether or not it “follows the rules.” Being treated with contempt is likely to generate additional rage and resentment, and victims may also conclude that a state that would blithely ignore well-established norms will not be bound by moral constraints in the future.

Third, this tendency will be compounded when the United States takes some action that harms another state, and when doing so violates principles that the United States had previously declared to be important. This sort of hypocrisy suggests that the United States regards the victims of its policies as inherently inferior, because it is acting as if its own cherished principles do not apply when its own behavior is involved. Thus, U.S. support for third-world dictators during the Cold War provoked widespread criticism partly because these rulers were frequently brutal and corrupt, and also because this behavior was at odds with the ideals that U.S. leaders proclaimed to be all-important. Similarly, many people in the Arab and Muslim world cannot understand why the United States supports selfdetermination in places such as Eastern Europe or the Balkans yet continues to support Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and maintains close ties with assorted Arab dictatorships. As the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board noted in November 2003, “When American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”93 It appears equally hypocritical when President George W. Bush condemns suicide bombings by Palestinian groups like Hamas and simultaneously hails Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace.” As Emad Eldin Adeeb, host of an Egyptian TV call-in show, put it, “When somebody comes and tells me that Mr. Sharon is a man of peace, and then you want me as a TV presenter to come out and try to defend American policy, I have nothing. I’m speechless. I have no weapons to answer my public opinion back.”⁹⁴ Small wonder, then, that Osama bin Laden was quick to seize upon Bush’s statement as part of his own efforts to rally Muslim support.⁹⁵

Fourth, U.S. actions will provoke greater resentment when they harm others without leading to some greater good.⁹⁶ When the United States does something that harms others but also brings clear and significant benefits, foreign resentment (including the anger of the victims) will be tempered by the recognition that this policy was motivated by laudable aims and ultimately led to a more desirable state of affairs. In the minds of others, at least, desirable ends can justify costly means. But when the United States harms another country solely to advance its own narrow self-interest, or when its actions harm others but do not produce any compensating benefits, then the victims (and possibly onlookers) are more likely to harbor a powerful sense of historical grievance.

Here it is useful to compare NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo with America’s subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although NATO’s military campaign killed a number of innocent civilians in Kosovo and Serbia, many residents in Bosnia and Kosovo saw the intervention as necessary to end a festering civil conflict and to help remove a brutal and dictatorial regime. Although some countries were critical of NATO’s action—and especially its decision to intervene without authorization from the UN Security Council—awareness that NATO was not acting for selfish reasons, and that intervention had improved the lives of many local residents, helped mitigate foreign concerns somewhat.

The situation in Iraq is quite different. For Americans, the costs of toppling Saddam Hussein appeared to be justified by the benefits of eliminating a brutal dictator, the eradication of Iraq’s alleged WMD programs, and the concern that Hussein might be collaborating with al Qaeda. Even if the invasion did entail some degree of suffering (mostly for Iraqis), these costs might have been justifiable if the occupation removed an imminent threat, led to a rapid improvement in the lives of the Iraqi people, and sparked positive political developments elsewhere in the region.

For the rest of the world, however, this calculus of means and ends was not very convincing before the war and has grown more dubious over time. Hardly anyone is sorry that Saddam is gone from power, but the failure to find WMD and the growing conviction that the Bush administration misled the world about the nature of the Iraqi threat has reinforced global opposition to the U.S. action. Nor have the war and the occupation led to a rapid improvement in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Unless the United States can point to significant and unmistakable improvements in the lives of Iraqis in the years ahead, the invasion will appear increasingly illegitimate, and foreign condemnation will perforce increase.

Of course, a sense of historical grievance can arise even when the United States bears little or no responsibility for some unfortunate historical event. Distorting the past is easiest when governments control key sources of information (i.e., the press, educational institutions, etc.), but even democratic governments have many tools for shaping the way past events are perceived. Even when the United States is largely innocent, therefore, it may still face populations who genuinely believe that it has done them harm. Thus, some Arabs probably accepted Egypt’s erroneous claim that U.S. warplanes had participated in Israel’s preemptive strike against Egypt’s air force during the 1967 Six-Day War, just as some Africans now believe HIV/AIDS is the result of a Western or American plot.97 The problem is even worse when the United States is not blameless, however, because its actions will give opponents valuable ammunition in their efforts to stoke anti-American attitudes. And, as we shall see, America’s own propensity for historical amnesia exacerbates this problem by making it more difficult for Americans to understand why any society might have legitimate grounds for wishing them ill.

What We Are Doing Today

As the case of Iraq reminds us, anti-Americanism is not just a response to actions the United States has taken in the distant past, or to the ways that its past behavior has been interpreted. It also reflects what the United States is currently doing, in terms of both its stated ambitions and the content of its policies. U.S. officials can proclaim benevolent intentions as often as they wish, but other countries are likely to pay more attention to what the United States does. In world politics, as in other realms of life, actions ultimately speak louder than words.

As discussed above, the evidence is now unmistakable that current U.S. policies are undermining its global standing. U.S. primacy was apparent to all by the mid-1990s, but there was only modest erosion in the U.S. position until the arrival of the second Bush administration. There were signs of strain in traditional U.S. alliances, openly expressed ambivalence about U.S. “hyperpower,” and a gradually rising number of terrorist attacks on U.S. forces overseas. On the whole, however, America’s standing in most of the world remained strong.

Needless to say, this is no longer the case. The dramatic decline in favorable attitudes toward the United States coincides perfectly with the Bush administration’s increasingly unilateralist foreign policy.98 Not only did the United States reject a number of well-publicized international conventions, but it did so in an especially irritating fashion. The Bush administration did not merely reject the Kyoto Protocol; it declared that the United States would never sign the treaty and declined to offer an alternative approach to global warming until many months later. And the justification that was given—that the treaty was “not in the United States’ economic best interests”—was unlikely to appeal to a world that knows the United States is both a wealthy country and the largest producer of greenhouse gases.⁹⁹ The administration did not just announce that it would not ratify the agreement establishing the International Criminal Court; it took the further (and unnecessary) step of “removing” the earlier U.S. “signature” from the treaty and then launched an aggressive diplomatic campaign to compel other states to reject the convention as well. The Bush administration took the lead in opposing a stiffer verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention (largely to protect the interests of U.S. drug companies and its own bioweapons research program), and abrogated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, despite deep misgivings from long-standing U.S. allies. The United States also showed scant regard for global opinion when it decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the United States unsuccessfully sought UN Security Council authorization for the Iraq invasion, it made clear from the outset that it did not regard such authorization as necessary. Indeed, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later acknowledged that the decision for war was made even before the UN was consulted, and the failure to obtain UN authorization did not slow the march to war.100

Explicit U.S. unilateralism provokes foreign opposition for two different reasons. On the one hand, unilateral U.S. actions can harm other states’ interests, and it should hardly surprise us when they react negatively. Conflicts of interest are inevitable in world politics, and sometimes the United States cannot accommodate other states’ concerns without sacrificing its own interests. In some cases, in short, the United States will have to defend its own interests even if this requires abstention from multilateral cooperation and acceptance of greater foreign hostility.

But shouldn’t Americans expect their elected officials to do their utmost to make sure that U.S. interests are protected, before worrying about what others think? Of course they should. But focusing solely on U.S. interests and paying scant attention to the interests of others is not without costs. In fact, the United States may pay a large—and unnecessary—price for treating the rest of the world as if it is merely an obstacle in its path. When top officials declare that the United States will do whatever it wants—even if the rest of the world is outraged—they are in effect saying to the rest of the world, “Your opinions are not worth considering.” If the United States consistently acts this way, its citizens should not be surprised if others resent it, or if others are pleased whenever something bad happens to the United States. Nor should Americans be surprised if some of their opponents retaliate when and where they can.

Democracy and Double Standards

Other countries will be especially resentful when the United States acts hypocritically, applying different standards to its own conduct than it expects from others. For example, U.S. leaders often emphasize their commitment to “the rule of law” and tend to be quick to condemn others whenever established legal principles are violated. Yet, like most other countries, the United States has also been willing to bend (or break) international law when it was in its interest to do so. Thus, the United States refused to acknowledge a World Court verdict condemning its covert campaign against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it has been widely criticized for its plans to try suspected al Qaeda members in secret military tribunals. The U.S. decision to hold suspected terrorists incommunicado—and indefinitely—as “enemy combatants” has been equally controversial, and it reinforces the sense that America’s commitment to the rule of law is overly flexible.

Indeed, examples of U.S. hypocrisy are numerous. U.S. leaders routinely invoke the principle of free trade and condemn trading partners for erecting barriers to U.S. goods, yet they abandon these principles when powerful U.S. interest groups are threatened by foreign competition. The United States pressures other countries not to acquire or test weapons of mass destruction, and it went to war against Iraq in order to keep Saddam Hussein from having them. Yet the United States has conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests and has more than 7,000 operational thermonuclear weapons of its own—a position hardly consistent with its efforts to deny them to others.101 While extolling its virtues as an apostle of freedom and democracy, the United States tolerated the apartheid government in South Africa for many years. It supported brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein when it was in its geopolitical interest to do so, and it now backs pro–U.S. dictatorships in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.

Finally, the United States has long adopted a double standard regarding the use of force. Americans were understandably outraged when al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in September 2001, and they were quick to condemn Osama bin Laden for al Qaeda’s attack on innocent civilians. Such a reaction is entirely appropriate, but it betrays a certain ignorance of America’s past conduct. The United States deliberately attacked thousands of civilians during World War II (including dropping two atomic bombs on Japan), and it did so with the explicit aim of sowing terror among the civilian population.102 Japan had started the war, of course, but the victims of these attacks were no more responsible for their government’s policies than the victims in the World Trade Center were responsible for the conduct of U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Yet, like most countries, the United States rarely acknowledges any moral similarity between its own “regrettable but necessary” actions and the “brutal and unwarranted” acts of its foes.

My purpose here is not to shine a spotlight on America’s past sins; it is simply to recognize that the United States often adopts one standard for its own behavior while demanding a different standard from others. As one would expect, the gap between what the United States prescribes for others and what it demands for itself has not gone unnoticed abroad. Indeed, it is a key theme of many of Osama bin Laden’s denunciations, for he knows that accusing the United States of acting hypocritically is a potent weapon in the struggle for hearts and minds around the world.¹⁰³

A hypocritical foreign policy creates several problems for the United States, especially given its dominant world role. First, instead of demonstrating that the United States is a principled nation—that is, a nation whose conduct is guided by certain ethical principles and whose word can be counted upon—hypocritical behavior casts doubt on America’s moral stature and the credibility of U.S. promises. It makes U.S. primacy less legitimate in the eyes of other countries, for they will regard it as especially unfair when the world’s most powerful country lacks virtue. Second, when the United States ignores the norms that it expects other states to observe, it is suggesting that the United States is unwilling to be bound by rules and more likely to use its considerable power without restraint. In addition to fostering foreign resentment, such behavior is likely to add to underlying fears about U.S. power itself.

Why Don’t Americans Understand This?

Unfortunately, most Americans do not fully understand why the rest of the world is worried about U.S. primacy and alarmed by specific U.S. policies. Although U.S. officials are aware that many states worry about U.S. power and know that some states (or groups) are deeply hostile, Americans still underestimate the degree of fear, resentment, and hostility that the United States provokes and do not fully comprehend its origins. As National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice replied when asked why Germany and France had opposed U.S. policy on Iraq, “I’ll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn’t understand it.”104 Why?

The Consequences of Asymmetric Power

One reason why the United States underestimates the level of foreign resentment is the sheer size of America’s global impact. Paradoxically, American power both creates foreign resentment and makes it more difficult for the United States to recognize why it occurs.

First, as noted in chapter 1, because the United States is so large, wealthy, and powerful, it invariably affects other states more than they affect it. Actions that U.S. leaders regard as trivial may have major effects on states that are much smaller and weaker. A protectionist tariff may benefit some narrow interest group here in the United States while having little overall effect on the U.S. economy, but it may well have quite severe effects on the economy of a small country that depends on exports to the United States.

Even when the United States is affected by its own actions, its policies tend to have an even greater impact elsewhere. U.S. involvement in the Korean and Vietnam Wars cost billions of dollars and more than 100,000 U.S. lives, but the effects on Korea and Indochina were much larger and more enduring. Similarly, the U.S.-backed “contra” war was politically controversial at home but in fact cost the United States relatively little in either blood or treasure. It was a major event in Nicaraguan history, however, killing at least 30,000 Nicaraguans.105 To put these figures in perspective, Nicaragua’s losses were the equivalent of America’s suffering approximately 1.8 million dead—a number far exceeding U.S. deaths in any of its past wars. Thus, Americans underestimate foreign hostility because we do not feel the full impact of our own actions, and thus we do not notice what we are doing to others and how they are responding.

Second, a preponderant power like the United States inevitably has a short attention span. With a world to run, Washington cannot devote as much attention to each part of the world as other states are likely to pay to their own situation and their own neighborhoods. Given America’s size and influence, other states devote plenty of time and effort to observing what the United States is up to, and they work hard to influence what the United States decides to do with its power. Smaller states such as Israel, Colombia, Kenya, and Singapore do not define their interests in global terms, and their foreign-policy agendas are limited by their resources. As a result, smaller states (and even medium-size powers such as Italy and Germany) tend to focus their attention on a finite set of issues.

By contrast, the United States has commitments and concerns in virtually every corner of the globe, and it tries to influence outcomes in a wide range of policy domains. Other states pay lots of attention to what we do, but U.S. leaders are inevitably distracted by events all over the world and focus on particular issues or areas only when they are compelled to do so. With our attention divided and distracted, we Americans may not even notice the full impact of our actions in any one area or on any one issue.

This problem is compounded both by the decentralized nature of the U.S. foreign-policy bureaucracy and the diverse nature of U.S. power. The management of U.S. foreign policy is divided among a host of competing government agencies, and coordination among them is notoriously imperfect and erratic.¹⁰⁶ Moreover, some U.S. actions abroad are either poorly publicized or deliberately covert, which means that many Americans—including members of the U.S. government—will be unaware of them. If the left hand of the U.S. government does not know what the right hand is doing, and if U.S. citizens do not know what either is up to, then we cannot hope to understand why other states are responding as they are.

This problem is even more severe when U.S. foreign policy is conducted in secret. Government officials and U.S. citizens cannot hope to understand the origins of foreign opposition if they are unaware of the policies that have provoked foreign ire. Chalmers Johnson refers to this phenomenon as “blowback,” which he defines as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” Even when Americans are partially aware of what their country is doing in one part of the world, they may miss the connection between what is happening in one place and the negative consequences that subsequently occur somewhere else. We may be aware that the United States supported Turkey’s anti-Kurdish campaign, bombed Libya in 1986, sent cruise missiles into Sudan in 1998, and conducted counterterrorist operations in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia in 2003, but we may not see how these activities led to negative repercussions later. As Johnson puts it, “The unintended consequences of American policies and acts in Country X are a bomb at an American embassy in Country Y and a dead American in Country Z.”107

Foreign perceptions of the United States are not driven solely by the official policies of the U.S. government, of course. America’s role in the world also includes the activities of U.S. corporations, foundations, media organizations, and various nongovernmental organizations, including the increasing use of private security firms in such far-flung places as Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet few of us will be aware of many of these activities. When a U.S. corporation decides to relocate an offshore manufacturing plant from one developing country to another, for example, it is an individual corporate decision that may not even be noticed by most of the company’s shareholders. Yet this decision could have large negative effects on some local community in another country. A plant closing in the United States might attract publicity here at home, but a plant closing in Malaysia, Guatemala, or Thailand will go unnoticed back in the United States. If this sort of corporate behavior generates anti-American attitudes, however, U.S. citizens will have no way of knowing where they came from or whether they have a legitimate basis. Even worse, when a private security firm like Dyncorp—which has a government contract to help protect Afghan President Hamid Karzai—uses abusive and heavyhanded tactics, the people it mistreats are likely to see it not as misconduct by a private corporation but rather as a direct reflection on the United States. Americans are likely to think that Afghans should be grateful that we are protecting Karzai, but Afghans themselves may dislike Americans because of the ways these U.S. firms are behaving.108

Finally, America’s image in the world is also shaped by the behavior of its allies and clients. When a pro-U.S. dictatorship represses its own people—as was done by the Pahlavi regime in Iran and the Somoza government in Nicaragua—its actions will also hurt America’s standing among the local population and in the eyes of foreign observers. When a close ally like Israel denies the national aspirations of the Palestinians and uses massive force against them, it reinforces Arab and Muslim hostility to the United States itself, even if the United States occasionally tries to distance itself from specific Israeli actions. Americans may be aware of these connections, but they are unlikely to recognize the degree to which their own reputations are shaped by the actions of others.

Historical Amnesia

As noted earlier, if other states believe that the United States has hurt them in the past, and especially if U.S. actions were unprovoked and cruel, they are likely to be suspicious of future U.S. behavior and prone to resent U.S. power. The memory of past humiliations and suffering fades slowly, and victims are likely to remember their sufferings long after the perpetrators have forgotten them. In extreme cases, a prior history of U.S. interference can create a deep reservoir of ill will and make it extremely difficult to build a positive relationship.

Unfortunately, the same events that others remember are the ones that the United States has probably gone to considerable lengths to forget. All countries sanitize their own history, of course, and are prone to downplay or deny their worst transgressions. Even when states recognize that they have committed egregious acts, they tend to portray them as necessary for their own security and as justified by the equally egregious actions of the other side. Open societies such as the United States may be less prone to the worst forms of historical falsification, but they are hardly immune.

For example, U.S. leaders have routinely justified their own actions by claiming they were provoked by others, while downplaying the possibility that the United States might have been partly responsible for the alleged provocation. During the Korean War, for example, the United States interpreted China’s entry into the war as a case of deliberate communist aggression and failed to recognize that it was primarily a reaction to the U.S. advance to the Chinese border.109 The result was two more years of war, and the conflict helped harden Sino-American hostility for nearly twenty years, yet U.S. citizens never recognized that U.S. policy had helped produce this result. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify escalating the war, but key U.S. officials failed to tell the U.S. Congress (or the American people) that the alleged North Vietnamese attack was itself a response to a series of covert U.S.-led raids on North Vietnamese territory. Today, we see global terrorism as motivated by radical animosity to U.S. values, and we discount the possibility that certain U.S. policies might be of equal (or greater) importance in provoking violence against us.

In each of these cases (and there are plenty of others), U.S. leaders claimed that the use of force by the United States was a defensive reaction to someone else’s unprovoked aggression. In each case, this interpretation was at best debatable and at worst simply incorrect. The issue is not whether U.S. policies were correct or not; the issue is that Americans were being told a false version of events. As a result, the targets of U.S. actions—that is, the foreign populations who were attacked by the United States—were certain to come away from these events with a very different understanding of what happened than Americans had. By portraying these incidents as examples of foreign aggression, and by justifying the American response as purely defensive, the United States had in effect blinded itself to how these events appeared to others.

But the problem is even broader than the ways in which U.S. leaders justify specific applications of military force. As in most countries, U.S. textbooks and public rhetoric tend to glorify our past achievements, give the United States too much credit for positive international developments, and omit or minimize the nation’s worst foreign-policy transgressions.110 As a result, U.S. leaders—and the general public—are often simply unaware of what the United States has actually done to others.

The consequences of this sort of historical amnesia can be severe, especially in an era when countries around the world are even more attentive to U.S. behavior and even more worried about what the United States might do. When the United States teaches a false version of the past, it is unable to understand why other societies may have valid reasons to be suspicious or hostile. Many Americans may have “forgotten” about their many interventions in Latin America, for example, but the inhabitants of these countries have not. The anti-American attitudes of Castro, the Sandinistas, and Hugo Chavez did not emerge solely from the misguided wellsprings of Marxist theory; they were also produced by the historical legacy of prior U.S. occupations and prolonged U.S. support for the Batista and Somoza dictatorships. Similarly, the sense of bitterness expressed by Mexican President Vicente Fox—which helps explain Mexico’s refusal to support the invasion of Iraq—reflects both his disappointment at being ignored by the Bush administration and the legacy of 150 years of U.S. dominance.

Furthermore, by portraying its international role as uniformly noble, principled, and benevolent, the United States teaches its citizens that the rest of the world should be grateful for the many blessings that Americans have (allegedly) bestowed upon them. When others do not offer us the gratitude we think we deserve, however, we conclude that they are either innately hostile or inspired by some sort of anti-American ideology, alien culture, or religious fanaticism. And once we have reached that conclusion, it is but a short step to believing that such groups deserve harsh treatment in return. By exaggerating our own virtues (and forgetting our past mistakes), we become less able to comprehend why others may mistrust or resent us and more likely to react in ways that will make existing conflicts of interest worse.

Conclusion

This chapter has identified the main reasons why U.S. primacy arouses concern, fear, and resentment around the world. Few countries seem willing to confront the United States directly, but many are increasingly uncomfortable with U.S. primacy and some are openly opposed.

But does any of this really matter? Those who favor the unilateral exercise of U.S. power sometimes acknowledge that others may not like it, but they quickly conclude that there is nothing that others can do about it. As former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan puts it, the only thing America needs is “political will and public support.

… The only thing that can stop America now is American resistance, revolt, or restraint.”111 Or, as historian Niall Ferguson commented, “The threat to America’s empire does not come from embryonic rival empires. . . . [But] it may come from the vacuum of power—the absence of a will to power—within.”112 As long as the United States is strong and resolute, so the argument runs, the fear of U.S. power will keep everyone else in line. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote several months before taking office, global leadership requires “demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so.”¹¹³ If other nations cannot be cowed, in short, then they can be ignored or crushed. This view of U.S. foreign relations assumes that hostile states can do little to harm us, so there is little reason to worry about anti-Americanism abroad. President Bush himself downplayed the danger of U.S. isolation by noting that in the war on terror, “at some point we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America.”¹¹⁴ From this perspective, the United States is strong enough to take on its remaining opponents and fashion a world that is conducive to U.S. interests and compatible with U.S. ideals, even if forced to act alone.

This view also assumes that most states have interests that are compatible with our own, and it ignores the possibility that these states are in fact trying to use U.S. power in ways that may benefit them but could harm the United States. In effect, it assumes that pro-American countries are fully supportive of U.S. foreign-policy goals either because they genuinely share them or because they know that resistance is futile.

The next two chapters will show that this smug overconfidence is misplaced. Both friends and foes have many ways of dealing with American power, and the United States is neither so powerful nor so wise that it can afford to disregard what others may do.