Why Don't They Like Us?

It wasn't its innocence that the United States lost on September 11, 2001.It was its naïveté. Americans have tended to believe that in the eyesof others the United States has lived up to the boastful clichéspropagated during the Cold War (especially under Ronald Reagan) and during theClinton administration. We were seen, we thought, as the champions of freedomagainst fascism and communism, as the advocates of decolonization, economic development, and social progress, as the technical innovators whose mastery oftechnology, science, and advanced education was going to unify the world.

Some officials and academics explained that U.S. hegemony was the bestthing for a troubled world and unlike past hegemonies would last--not onlybecause there were no challengers strong enough to steal the crown but, aboveall, because we were benign rulers who threatened no one.

But we have avoided looking at the hegemon's clay feet, at what mightneutralize our vaunted soft power and undermine our hard power. Like swarminginsects exposed when a fallen tree is lifted, millions who dislike or distrustthe hegemon have suddenly appeared after September 11, much to our horror anddisbelief. America became a great power after World War II, when we faced a rivalthat seemed to stand for everything we had been fighting against--tyranny, terror,brainwashing--and we thought that our international reputation would benefit fromour standing for liberty and stability (as it still does in much of EasternEurope). We were not sufficiently marinated in history to know that, through theages, nobody--or almost nobody--has ever loved a hegemon.

Past hegemons, from Rome to Great Britain, tended to be quite realistic aboutthis. They wanted to be obeyed or, as in the case of France, admired. They rarelywanted to be loved. But as a combination of high-noon sheriff and proselytizingmissionary, the United States expects gratitude and affection. It was bound to bedisappointed; gratitude is not an emotion that one associates with the behaviorof states.

The New World Disorder

This is an old story. Two sets of factors make the current twist a newone. First, the so-called Westphalian world has collapsed. The world of sovereignstates, the universe of Hans Morgenthau's and Henry Kissinger's Realism, is nolonger. The unpopularity of the hegemonic power has been heightened toincandescence by two aspects of this collapse. One is the irruption of thepublic, the masses, in international affairs. Foreign policy is no longer, asRaymond Aron had written in Peace and War, the closed domain of the soldierand the diplomat. Domestic publics--along with their interest groups, religiousorganizations, and ideological chapels--either dictate or constrain theimperatives and preferences that the governments fight for. This puts the hegemonin a difficult position: It often must work with governments that represent but asmall percentage of a country's people--but if it fishes for public supportabroad, it risks alienating leaders whose cooperation it needs. The United Statespaid heavily for not having had enough contacts with the opposition to the shahof Iran in the 1970s. It discovers today that there is an abyss in Pakistan,Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia between our official allies and the populace inthese countries. Diplomacy in a world where the masses, so to speak, stayedindoors, was a much easier game.

The collapse of the barrier between domestic and foreign affairs in the statesystem is now accompanied by a disease that attacks the state system itself. Manyof the "states" that are members of the United Nations are pseudo-states withshaky or shabby institutions, no basic consensus on values or on procedures amongtheir heterogeneous components, and no sense of national identity. Thus thehegemon--in addition to suffering the hostility of the government in certaincountries (like Cuba, Iraq, and North Korea) and of the public in others (like,in varying degrees, Pakistan, Egypt, and even France)--can now easily become boththe target of factions fighting one another in disintegrating countries and thepawn in their quarrels (which range over such increasingly borderless issues asdrug trafficking, arms trading, money laundering, and other criminal enterprises).In addition, today's hegemon suffers from the volatility and turbulence of aglobal system in which ethnic, religious, and ideological sympathies have becometransnational and in which groups and individuals uncontrolled by states can acton their own. The world of the nineteenth century, when hegemons could imposetheir order, their institutions, has been supplanted by the world of thetwenty-first century: Where once there was order, there is now often a vacuum.

What makes the American Empire especially vulnerable is its historicallyunique combination of assets and liabilities. One has to go back to the RomanEmpire to find a comparable set of resources. Britain, France, and Spain had tooperate in multipolar systems; the United States is the only superpower.

But if America's means are vast, the limits of its power are alsoconsiderable. The United States, unlike Rome, cannot simply impose its will byforce or through satellite states. Small "rogue" states can defy the hegemon(remember Vietnam?). And chaos can easily result from the large new role ofnonstate actors. Meanwhile, the reluctance of Americans to take on the Herculeantasks of policing, "nation building," democratizing autocracies, and providingenvironmental protection and economic growth for billions of human beings stokesboth resentment and hostility, especially among those who discover that one cancount on American presence and leadership only when America's material interestsare gravely threatened. (It is not surprising that the "defense of the nationalinterest" approach of Realism was developed for a multipolar world. In an empire,as well as in a bipolar system, almost anything can be described as a vitalinterest, since even peripheral disorder can unravel the superpower's eminence.)Moreover, the complexities of America's process for making foreign-policydecisions can produce disappointments abroad when policies that the internationalcommunity counted on--such as the Kyoto Protocol and the International CriminalCourt--are thwarted. Also, the fickleness of U.S. foreign-policy making in arenaslike the Balkans has convinced many American enemies that this country isbasically incapable of pursuing long-term policies consistently.

None of this means, of course, that the United States has nofriends in the world. Europeans have not forgotten the liberating role played byAmericans in the war against Hitler and in the Cold War. Israel remembers howPresident Harry Truman sided with the founders of the Zionist state; nor has itforgotten all the help the United States has given it since then. Thedemocratizations of postwar Germany and Japan were huge successes. The MarshallPlan and the Point Four Program were revolutionary initiatives. The decisions toresist aggression in Korea and in Kuwait demonstrated a commendablefarsightedness.

But Americans have a tendency to overlook the dark sides of theircourse (except on the protesting left, which is thus constantly accused of beingun-American), perhaps because they perceive international affairs in terms ofcrusades between good and evil, endeavors that entail formidable pressures forunanimity. It is not surprising that the decade following the Gulf War was markedboth by nostalgia for the clear days of the Cold War and by a lot of flounderingand hesitating in a world without an overwhelming foe.

Strains of Anti-Americanism

The main criticisms of American behavior have mostly been around for along time. When we look at anti-Americanism today, we must first distinguishbetween those who attack the United States for what it does, or fails to do, andthose who attack it for what it is. (Some, like the Islamic fundamentalists andterrorists, attack it for both reasons.) Perhaps the principal criticism is ofthe contrast between our ideology of universal liberalism and policies that haveall too often consisted of supporting and sometimes installing singularlyauthoritarian and repressive regimes. (One reason why these policies oftenelicited more reproaches than Soviet control over satellites was that, as timewent by, Stalinism became more and more cynical and thus the gap between wordsand deeds became far less wide than in the United States. One no longer expectedmuch from Moscow.) The list of places where America failed at times to live up toits proclaimed ideals is long: Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, Chile, SantoDomingo in 1965, the Greece of the colonels, Pakistan, the Philippines ofFerdinand Marcos, Indonesia after 1965, the shah's Iran, Saudi Arabia, Zaire,and, of course, South Vietnam. Enemies of these regimes were shocked by U.S.support for them--and even those whom we supported were disappointed, or worse,when America's cost-benefit analysis changed and we dropped our erstwhile allies.This Machiavellian scheming behind a Wilsonian facade has alienated many clients,as well as potential friends, and bred strains of anti-Americanism around theworld.

A second grievance concerns America's frequent unilateralism and the difficultrelationship between the United States and the United Nations. For manycountries, the United Nations is, for all its flaws, the essential agency ofcooperation and the protector of its members' sovereignty. The way U.S. diplomacyhas "insulted" the UN system--sometimes by ignoring it and sometimes by rudelyimposing its views and policies on it--has been costly in terms of foreignsupport.

Third, the United States' sorry record in international development hasrecently become a source of dissatisfaction abroad. Not only have America'sfinancial contributions for narrowing the gap between the rich and the poordeclined since the end of the Cold War, but American-dominated institutions suchas the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have often dictatedfinancial policies that turned out to be disastrous for developing countries--mostnotably, before and during the Asian economic crisis of the mid-1990s.

Finally, there is the issue of American support of Israel. Much of theworld--and not only the Arab world--considers America's Israel policy to bebiased. Despite occasional American attempts at evenhandedness, the world seesthat the Palestinians remain under occupation, Israeli settlements continue toexpand, and individual acts of Arab terrorism--acts that Yasir Arafat can'tcompletely control--are condemned more harshly than the killings of Palestiniansby the Israeli army or by Israeli-sanctioned assassination squads. It isinteresting to note that Israel, the smaller and dependent power, has been moresuccessful in circumscribing the United States' freedom to maneuverdiplomatically in the region than the United States has been at getting Israel toenforce the UN resolutions adopted after the 1967 war (which called for thewithdrawal of Israeli forces from then-occupied territories, solving the refugeecrisis, and establishing inviolate territorial zones for all states in theregion). Many in the Arab world, and some outside, use this state of affairs tostoke paranoia of the "Jewish lobby" in the United States.

Antiglobalism and Anti-Americanism

Those who attack specific American policies are often more ambivalentthan hostile. They often envy the qualities and institutions that have helpedthe United States grow rich, powerful, and influential.

The real United States haters are those whose anti-Americanism is provoked bydislike of America's values, institutions, and society--and their enormous impactabroad. Many who despise America see us as representing the vanguard ofglobalization--even as they themselves use globalization to promote their hatred.The Islamic fundamentalists of al-Qaeda--like Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini 20 yearsago--make excellent use of the communication technologies that are so essentialto the spread of global trade and economic influence.

We must be careful here, for there are distinctions among the antiglobaliststrains that fuel anti-Americanism. To some of our detractors, the most eloquentspokesman is bin Laden, for whom America and the globalization it promotesrelentlessly through free trade and institutions under its control representevil. To them, American-fueled globalism symbolizes the domination of theChristian-Jewish infidels or the triumph of pure secularism: They look at theUnited States and see a society of materialism, moral laxity, corruption in allits forms, fierce selfishness, and so on. (The charges are familiar to us becausewe know them as an exacerbated form of right-wing anti-Americanism in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe.) But there are also those who, while accepting the inevitability of globalization and seem eager to benefit from it, are incensed bythe contrast between America's promises and the realities of American life.Looking at the United States and the countries we support, they see insufficientsocial protection, vast pockets of poverty amidst plenty, racial discrimination,the large role of money in politics, the domination of the elites--and they callus hypocrites. (And these charges, too, are familiar, because they are anexacerbated version of the left-wing anti-Americanism still powerful in WesternEurope.)

On the one hand, those who see themselves as underdogs of the world condemnthe United States for being an evil force because its dynamism makes it naturallyand endlessly imperialistic--a behemoth that imposes its culture (often seen asdebased), its democracy (often seen as flawed), and its conception of individualhuman rights (often seen as a threat to more communitarian and more sociallyconcerned approaches) on other societies. The United States is perceived as abully ready to use all means, including overwhelming force, against those whoresist it: Hence, Hiroshima, the horrors of Vietnam, the rage against Iraq, thewar on Afghanistan.

On the other hand, the underdogs draw hope from their conviction that thegiant has a heel like Achilles'. They view America as a society that cannottolerate high casualties and prolonged sacrifices and discomforts, one whoseimpatience with protracted and undecisive conflicts should encourage its victimsto be patient and relentless in their challenges and assaults. They look atAmerican foreign policy as one that is often incapable of overcoming obstaclesand of sticking to a course that is fraught with high risks--as with the conflictwith Iraq's Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War; as in the flight fromLebanon after the terrorist attacks of 1982; as in Somalia in 1993; as in theattempts to strike back at bin Laden in the Clinton years.

Thus America stands condemned not because our enemies necessarily hate ourfreedoms but because they resent what they fear are our Darwinian aspects, andoften because they deplore what they see as the softness at our core. Those who,on our side, note and celebrate America's power of attraction, its openness toimmigrants and refugees, the uniqueness of a society based on common principlesrather than on ethnicity or on an old culture, are not wrong. But many of theforeign students, for instance, who fall in love with the gifts of Americaneducation return home, where the attraction often fades. Those who stay sometimesfeel that the price they have to pay in order to assimilate and be accepted istoo high.

What Bred bin Laden

This long catalog of grievances obviously needs to be picked apart. Thecomplaints vary in intensity; different cultures, countries, and partiesemphasize different flaws, and the criticism is often wildly excessive and unfair.But we are not dealing here with purely rational arguments; we are dealing withemotional responses to the omnipresence of a hegemon, to the sense that manypeople outside this country have that the United States dominates their lives.

Complaints are often contradictory: Consider "America has neglected us,or dropped us" versus "America's attentions corrupt our culture." The result canbe a gestalt of resentment that strikes Americans as absurd: We are damned, forinstance, both for failing to intervene to protect Muslims in the Balkans and forusing force to do so.

But the extraordinary array of roles that America plays in the world--alongwith its boastful attitude and, especially recently, its cavalierunilateralism--ensures that many wrongs caused by local regimes and societieswill be blamed on the United States. We even end up being seen as responsible notonly for anything bad that our "protectorates" do--it is no coincidence that manyof the September 11 terrorists came from America's protégés, SaudiArabia and Egypt--but for what our allies do, as when Arabs incensed by racismand joblessness in France take up bin Laden's cause, or when Muslims talk aboutAmerican violence against the Palestinians. Bin Laden's extraordinary appeal andprestige in the Muslim world do not mean that his apocalyptic nihilism (to useMichael Ignatieff's term) is fully endorsed by all those who chant his name. Yetto many, he plays the role of a bloody Robin Hood, inflicting pain and humiliation on the superpower that they believe torments them.

Bin Laden fills the need for people who, rightly or not, feel collectivelyhumiliated and individually in despair to attach themselves to a savior. Theymay in fact avert their eyes from the most unsavory of his deeds. This need onthe part of the poor and dispossessed to connect their own feeble lot to acharismatic and single-minded leader was at the core of fascism and of communism.After the failure of pan-Arabism, the fiasco of nationalism, the dashed hopes ofdemocratization, and the fall of Soviet communism, many young people in theMuslim world who might have once turned to these visions for succor turned instead to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

One almost always finds the same psychological dynamics at work in suchbehavior: the search for simple explanations--and what is simpler and moreinflammatory than the machinations of the Jews and the evils of America--and ahighly selective approach to history. Islamic fundamentalists remember thepromises made by the British to the Arabs in World War I and the imposition ofBritish and French imperialism after 1918 rather than the support the UnitedStates gave to anticolonialists in French North Africa in the late 1940s and inthe 1950s. They remember British opposition to and American reluctance towardintervention in Bosnia before Srebrenica, but they forget about NATO's actions tosave Bosnian Muslims in 1995, to help Albanians in Kosovo in 1999, and topreserve and improve Albanians' rights in Macedonia in 2001. Such distortions aremanufactured and maintained by the controlled media and schools of totalitarianregimes, and through the religious schools, conspiracy mills, and propaganda offundamentalism.

What Can Be Done?

Americans can do very little about the most extreme andviolent forms of anti-American hatred--but they can try to limit its spread byaddressing grievances that are justified. There are a number of ways to do this: