Why Do They Hate Us?

AuthorFordham, Benjamin
PositionAmerica Against the World: How We are Different and Why We Are Disliked - Book review

Why Do They Hate Us?

Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked. (New York: Times Books, 2006, pp. xix, 259, charts, notes, index. $25 cloth).

For a brief period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States received widespread sympathy and support from around the world. The French daily Le Monde declared that "[i]n this tragic moment ... we are all Americans." This pro-American interlude did not last. By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, both American foreign policy and the American people were increasingly unpopular, even in longtime European allies. This shift in international public opinion is critically important for the future of American foreign policy. If it is a short-term phenomenon driven by opposition to the war in Iraq, the burdens it imposes on the conduct of American foreign policy might be temporary. On the other hand, if recent anti-Americanism is driven by more persistent trends or deeper differences between the United States and the rest of the world, it would represent a much more serious problem.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has been among the leading chroniclers of the recent rise in anti-American sentiment, conducting a series of ambitious, cross-national surveys tapping public attitudes toward international affairs. In America Against the World, the center's director, Andrew Kohut, and Bruce Stokes, an international economics columnist for the National Journal, use this impressive body of evidence to compare patterns in American public opinion to those in other parts of the world in an effort to identify the sources of anti-Americanism. They find evidence of "American exceptionalism" in some public attitudes on important political and social issues. They argue that some of these differences, coupled with the enormous international power and presence of the United States, may fuel anti-American sentiment. Kohut and Stokes write that some instances of American exceptionalism, while real enough, only create anti-Americanism because they are misunderstood. For example, while surveys indicate that religion is indeed more important to Americans than to most Europeans, it does not shape Americans' foreign policy attitudes to the extent that some European observers have claimed. Similarly, while Americans tend to be more patriotic than citizens of most other wealthy nations, they express little interest...

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