• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1276 0

United States has taken strong military action—for example, when it deployed Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s. In fact, the historical record highlights the opposite. The street demonstrations and public protests against the Pershing deployments made for good television, but the reality was that, in most polls, 30 to 40 percent of Europeans, and often more, strongly supported American policies. Even in Germany, where pacifist feelings ran sky-high, 53 percent of the population supported the Pershing deployments, according to a 1981 poll in Der Spiegel. A majority of the French supported American policy through much of Ronald Reagan’s two terms, even preferring him to the Democratic candidate in the 1984 election, Walter Mondale. Today, in contrast, staggering majorities in most European countries—as high as 80 percent in many places—oppose U.S. foreign policy. The percentage of people holding a favorable view of the United States has gone up considerably since the election of Barack Obama, but in many countries it is still below the levels seen in 2000.

Josef Joffe, one of Germany’s leading international affairs commentators, observes that, during the Cold War, anti-Americanism was a left-wing phenomenon. “In contrast to it, there was always a center-right that was anti-communist and thus pro-American,” he explains. “The numbers waxed and waned, but you always had a solid base of support for the United States.” In short, the Cold War kept Europe pro-American. The year 1968, for example, saw mass protests against American policies in Vietnam, but it was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Europeans (and Asians) could oppose America, but their views were balanced by wariness of the Soviet threat. Again, the polls bear this out. European opposition even to the Vietnam War never approached the level of the opposition to Iraq. This was true outside Europe as well. In Australia, a majority of the public supported that country’s participation in the Vietnam War through 1971, when it withdrew its forces.

For most of the world, the Iraq War was not about Iraq. “What does Mexico or Chile care about who rules in Baghdad?” Jorge Castañeda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, told me. “It was about how the world’s superpower wields its power. That’s something we all care deeply about.” Even if Iraq works out, that will solve only the Iraq problem. The America problem will remain. People around the globe worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power. Even if they cannot contest this power, they can complicate it. In the case of Iraq, no country could stop the United States from going to war without international sanction, but the rest of the world has made the effort more difficult by largely sitting on the sidelines in the aftermath. As late as 2008, not one Arab country had opened an embassy in Baghdad. Non-Arab allies of the United States have not been much more helpful.

Nicolas Sarkozy delighted in being called “the American” and even “the neoconservative” in France. He is unabashedly pro-American and makes clear that he wants to emulate the United States in many ways. When he met Condoleezza Rice after his election as France’s president, in May 2007, she asked him, “What can I do for you?” His response was revealing. “Improve your image in the world,” he said. “It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can do to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.”5

The neoconservative writer Robert Kagan argues that European and American differences over multilateral cooperation are a result of their relative strengths. When Europe’s major countries were the world’s great powers, they celebrated realpolitik and cared little for international cooperation. Since Europe is now weak, according to Kagan, it favors