Yet another
poll shows that Europeans increasingly disapprove of U.S.
foreign policy. Released yesterday by the German Marshall Fund of
the United States and the Compagnia di San Paolo (in Turin, Italy),
the survey says that 70 percent of Frenchmen consider American
global leadership “undesirable.” That may not be news, but it turns
out that half of Germans and Italians now feel the same way — 20
percentage points higher than last year.
“The trans-Atlantic split over war in Iraq has undermined
America’s standing with Europeans,” the poll’s authors conclude;
and the president of the German Marshall Fund draws the lesson that
“neither Europeans nor Americans want to go it alone or compete
with each other on foreign policy. They both want to see a strong
European Union and a U.S. superpower that works through
multilateral institutions.”
The
New York Times makes the point more explicitly: “The
survey offers a snapshot of changing attitudes since the Bush
administration, frustrated by some European resistance to war, led
a coalition to battle in Iraq without the authorization of the
United Nations Security Council.” In other words, the rest of the
world hates us for Bush’s unilateralism.
Fouad
Ajami thinks that’s a bunch of malicious nonsense. In the
latest issue of Foreign Policy, he writes that the second
Gulf War hasn’t made other countries hate us. They hated us
already.
“Anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French
public life” in the 1990s, as defenders of France’s egalitarian and
protectionist traditions struggled to fend off U.S.-led economic
globalization, Ajami writes. Even that now-famous Le Monde
headline of September 13, 2001 (“Nous sommes tous
Américains”) ran over an editorial claiming that Osama bin
Laden was the creature of a Frankenstein America.
Greeks, too, have been angry for a while, even if the U.S. has
hardly noticed. Apparently they resent America for opposing the
Serbs, fellow Orthodox Christians, in Bosnia and Kosovo during the
1990s. In the Islamic world, Ajami reminds us, it’s the same story.
Muslims were seething long before Washington supposedly flouted the
will of the international community by attacking Iraq.
Behind even relatively old grievances that other nations have
against the U.S., Ajami detects a deeper motive: envy. The world
wants to be rich and free like America, but is afraid of the change
and sacrifice that this would entail. “To come bearing modernism to
those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to
represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears
— that is the American burden.”
For Ajami, this internal conflict explains why America gets the
blame for such contradictory sins. Frenchmen say we’re a gang of
Christian zealots; Jordanians denounce us as materialistic
infidels. Greeks accuse us of favoring Islam; Arabs claim the
opposite.
The most delicious irony that Ajami identifies is that of the
Turks, whom the U.S. has long supported in their bid to join the
European Union, but who protested America’s Iraq policy this year
“in the apparent hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is)
would finally take Turkey and the Turks into the fold.”
Ajami doesn’t try to explain why America’s international poll
numbers have dipped in the last year. Perhaps he takes it for
granted that so colossal an assertion of our envied power as Gulf
War II was bound to elicit the world’s latent resentment. In any
case, he doesn’t think we should worry about it, because no matter
what we do, “this kind of envy cannot be attenuated.”
