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Copyright, Bernard Chazelle, Princeton, September 2004
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/antiam.html
mail: chazelle@cs.princeton.edu
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ANTI-AMERICANISM: A CLINICAL STUDY
By Bernard Chazelle
Last summer, with France on his mind, the British historian
Paul Johnson graced the pages of Forbes Magazine with this trenchant
observation: "Anti-Americanism is racist envy" [1].
Lest anyone miss the point, the best-selling author quickly
rephrased it in more accessible language: "France is not a democracy."
His novel insight could hardly be dismissed as mere "anti-Frenchism"
for the simple reason that the word does not exist. In fact, neither does
anti-Polishism, anti-Spanishism, or even anti-Vaticanism. (Each one googles
in the single digits--the modern definition of nonexistence.)
With over 115,000 Google hits, anti-Americanism stands alone: a living
testament to US exceptionalism.
But what is it, anyway? As so often, ingenuousness is of no help.
Indeed, if the word were to connote simple, unadorned hostility
toward Americans, wouldn't the enslavement of half the population of the
Deep South in the mid-19th century constitute its most perfect
embodiment [2]? Slavery, lynchings, miscegenation laws... Truly, can
anything be more anti-American?
Apparently yes. Google the words "anti-Americanism, Jim Crow"
and you get a paltry 390 hits. Substitute "Jacques Chirac"
for "Jim Crow" and you rake in a much healthier 5,210 hits.
Trade the French president for "intellectuals" and up you soar to 14,000.
Paul Johnson understands: "Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease
of intellectuals today," avers the historian, who, leaving Osama off
the hook, proceeds to aim his fire at effete gaggles of Gauloises-puffing
cafe intellectuals. What gives?
In a mildly deranged way, Johnson has a point. Anti-Americanism barks
more than it bites. September 11 is the grim exception to the rule
that terrorism kills few Americans: rarely more than 20 a year, which is
less than lightning [3,4]. Israel has a rate of terrorist fatalities
hundreds of times higher [5]. Sri Lanka, home of the Tamil Tigers, has
suffered, on a per-capita basis, the equivalent of one 9/11 every 3 weeks.
And this for 20 consecutive years [6].
Granted, numbers alone obscure the central lesson of 9/11, which
is its ominous portent for the future: the mythical nuclear suitcase
at Penn Station. But to instill fear is no defining feature of
anti-Americanism; for, as recent events prove, the residents of
Mombasa, Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, and Madrid are every bit
as entitled to their anxieties as New Yorkers are to theirs.
Tempting as it is to dismiss Johnson's focus on diseased intellectuals
as merely proof that it takes one to spot one, the reader would be well
advised to resist.
WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
Being ground zero for sophisticated, unifying, and reflexive
anti-Americanism, France provides a glimpse of the disease at its
most distinctive. In two recent books, Jean-Francois Revel and Philippe
Roger have intelligently researched this phenomenon [7,8].
France does not come off well. Anti-Americanism is diagnosed as a
pathological condition of old lineage which feeds on a witch's brew of
hypocrisy, resentment, illiberalism, and a deep-rooted aversion to change.
Trudging through its affliction, however, France has remained rather
fond of America. A May 2000 SOFRES poll revealed that only 10 percent
of its citizens dislike the United States [8]. French anti-Americanism
is mostly an elite sport. Quite the opposite of French-bashing stateside,
which is the last PC-free zone for hate speech in America
and a market-tested crowd pleaser for late-night TV comedy.
What the two ethnophobias have in common is a refreshing lack of inhibition.
Thus, one could only admire France's Minister of Culture, Jack Lang,
for keeping a straight face while calling Spielberg's "Jurassic Park"
a "threat to French identity." (OK, French politics does have its
share of dinosaurs.) In perfect counterpoint, the run-up to the war
saw Lang's partners-in-neurosis at Fox News vituperate obsessively,
hysterically, maniacally, and deliriously about France's
"pathetic irrelevance," seemingly oblivious to the contradiction.
The French may be fond of Americans, but over 80 percent of them
viscerally reject US lifestyle and customs [9]. Little "racist envy"
there. Ominously, signs of a post-Cold War continental drift abound.
While a 1988 survey rated "power, dynamism, wealth," and "liberty"
as the words most frequently associated with American society,
by 1996 the top choices had become "violence, power, inequalities,"
and "racism" [9]. Granted, the French are not the type to let
ignorance of a subject get in the way of an opinion.
But French obduracy is not the point. A striking dichotomy between
liking Americans and spurning their values is now deeply entrenched
in much of Western Europe. Large majorities of Germans, Italians, and
British characterize America as "domineering, racist," and "violent" [10].
In March 2003, the percentage of people holding a favorable view of
the US was only 48% in Britain, 31% in France, and 14% in Spain [11].
On societal issues such as poverty, gun control, and the death penalty,
the continental divide appears beyond bridging. The phenomenon is worldwide.
In 34 of 43 countries polled in 2002, a majority of people said they
disliked America's influence in their country [12].
In that quarter of humanity called the Muslim world, anti-US hostility
is at a fever pitch.
Neocon scholar Robert Kagan's catchy aphorism [13], "Americans are from
Mars and Europeans are from Venus," strikes a chord with Europeans,
who remember their own Martian phase only too well and feel so relieved
to have outgrown it. The poetry of Rumsfeldian power lust tends to
get lost in translation. To war-weary Europeans, who've been there
and done the imperial power thing before, Kagan's martial fantasies sound
perilously premodern, boyishly immature, brazenly anti-feminist,
and--as my teenage daughter would say--so last millenium.
Ah, the great cleansing, avenging power of war! Its seductive lure
was irresistible in the summer of 1914. On the eve of the war
to end all wars, Thomas Mann called the imminent slaughter a
moral necessity... "both a purging and a liberation" [14].
A mere three weeks into the war, a quarter-million French soldiers
had died. Some purging, indeed. In the spring of 2003, Bush's America,
too, felt the cleansing urge and heeded the avenging call. Echoing Mann
while kindly sparing us the intestinal metaphor, Andrew Sullivan
called the Iraq war "a moral necessity" [15]: 13,000 civilians killed,
a Saddam-lite puppet regime, and a fresh resupply of hatred against
the United States. Isn't moral clarity beautiful when actions are divorced
from their consequences?
MANIFEST DESTINY GONE GLOBAL
When President Bush is not busy hailing freedom, he is usually
occupied extolling liberty. On the lofty matters of democracy,
freedom, and human rights, his administration proudly talks the talk.
The walking--as ever the weak link--has gotten alarmingly wobbly.
It was once proud and steady: In the wake of World War II,
the United States bestrode the globe like a colossus
with twice the relative economic clout it enjoys today.
Fresh from liberating the world from tyranny, America was
universally revered. Where Europe stood for ruin, fascism,
and colonization, the US spelled wealth, freedom,
and self-determination.
Then came Korea, a nervous draw, followed by Vietnam, a bitter
defeat. TIME Magazine captured the navel-gazing torpor with its
characterization of the My Lai massacre as an "American" tragedy [16].
(Does that make the Holocaust a "German" tragedy?)
America had invaded Vietnam, killed well over two million of its citizens,
and then fled. While staring into an abyss of disillusion, many
in the Third World began to wonder: Was the colossus the new
apostle of freedom or merely the heir to the throne of Western
imperialism? That it could be a bit of both was a subtlety lost on
the many to whom the sight of white men killing the natives
never had more than one meaning. Fighting the scourge of communism
was a worthy cause. But at what price? To make up for all of its
dictator-propping interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia,
Greece, Chile, etc, how many democracies did the US help spawn
during the Cold War? Sadly, not a single one. Today, for all his
talk of freedom, Bush is busy emulating Saddam by filling graves
with dead Shiites. Meanwhile, with 725 bases overseas and troops
in 70 percent of the world's countries [17], the US military
footprint is large enough to ensure that, for millions around the world,
Americans are people in uniform. Rambo's paternity rights are
hardly Hollywood's alone.
Which is rather unfortunate, for if there is one nation
on earth that has always represented (if not always delivered)
liberty and hope for the oppressed of the world, it is America.
Brilliance rarely is the first attribute one associates with
George W. Bush, but even his detractors must concede that his
contribution to the cause of anti-Americanism is a feat of
staggering genius [18]. Never has the United States been so
alienated from the rest of the world. Why? It's the policy, stupid!
Pro-war columnists are wont to attribute the hostility
to dark, evil, irrational forces, thus bringing to their diagnosis
the full power and sophistication of voodoo medicine.
More level-headed observers see the hand of a US leadership
trapped in its own delusions, and marrying, against all odds,
equal measures of cynicism and naivete.
Notch this one up in the cynical column. The US has made two
new friends: Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, whose pastime is to
boil his opponents to death [19], and Turkmenistan's Saparmurat
Niyazov, whose proudest accomplishment is to have renamed the
months of the year after himself [20]. Both of these unsavory
crackpots are now the beneficiaries of US largesse:
the Saddams of tomorrow. Meanwhile, in line with the White House's
dismissal of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint," the task of
spreading American values in the Arab world landed in the lap
of Abu Ghraib Porn & Snuff Film Studios: a temporary commission
of lasting consequence. America used to be both hated and feared
in the Muslim world. With its aura of invincibility shattered
in the plains of Mesopotamia, now it is only hated. Let no one ever
say that Bush did not bring a smile to an Arab's face:
Osama, today, is crying with joy.
CULTURE SOUP FOR SALE
Beethoven and good plumbing are both German, but few have trouble
distinguishing between the two. Germany floods the planet with
finely engineered machine tools; yet it is the rare auto worker
in Detroit who switches on his Siemens auto-feed drilling machine
and exclaims: "My, what a fine culture those Germans have!"
The world buys German engineering because it's good, not because
it's German. Not so with Air Jordans. Watch Nike and Coca-Cola
go around the world peddling footwear and sugary water with bubbles
as proud emblems of American culture. This conflation of culture,
lifestyle, and branding gives Americanization its distinctive flavor.
The word could just as well refer to the vibrant hip-hop scene
in France, the film-making influence of Martin Scorsese, the
architectural impact of Frank Gehry, or the proliferation of
MBA programs. But it does not. Not in the popular imagination, anyway.
Thomas L. Friedman explains: "Globalization is so much Americanization.
It wears Mickey Mouse ears, and it drinks Coke, and it eats Big Macs..." [21].
Somewhat lost in the stirring eloquence and exalted imagery is a
sobering truth: Americanization is not about the Bill of Rights or the
influence of bebop. According to Friedman, it's about how to get fat and look silly.
It presents the world with a narrative in which the US is seen to efface
its opulent cultural complexity in order to hawk infantile,
reassuring sameness. The downside is that few have the skill required
to wake up to Kenny G in the morning, down a bowl of Cocoa Puffs
over breakfast, lunch on a Whopper over Jerry Springer, read up on
Atkins in the afternoon, watch "Rambo III" in the evening,
and then go to bed with full confidence that American civilization
is the answer to Ancient Greece.
But wait! Isn't America home to much of the world's finest music, film,
fiction, science, and medicine? Aren't the vitality of its civic
institutions and the strength of its local democracy unparalleled?
Isn't US culture a treasure trove of magnificent riches? Yes, yes, and yes;
but Americanization pitches a different set of superlatives, ie,
the world's finest crappy food, funnest crash-and-burn
blockbusters, and shrillest consumerism. Paul Hollander's recent claim [22]
that "Americanization is the major, perhaps the only, widespread form
of modernization" suggests someone who's never used a cell phone in Europe,
ridden the subway in Hong Kong, watched TV in Japan, or come to grips
with the fact that for every Intel, Boeing, Lucent, and GM, there
is a Samsung, Airbus, Alcatel, and Toyota.
Many fret about the dangers of crass, US-style materialism.
But the evil of Americanization is greatly overblown: The planet will
not only survive it; it will likely enjoy it. What it will do to
America's image, however, is an entirely different matter.
If Americanization means typecasting the US as the land of Coke, Big Macs,
and Britney Spears rather than the land of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Thelonious Monk, and Philip Roth, the biggest loser will be America.
Does anyone care? Judging from the pitiful state of American public
diplomacy--budgeted at one quarter of 1 percent of defense spending [23]--
the answer seems to be no.
Just as English is the world's most slaughtered language, American culture
is the most trivialized. To compound the sin, it is also often used
as a Rorschach test in support of one's prejudices. Some will point out
that the US is the world's oldest democracy. Others will retort that
it was an apartheid society for 80 percent of its history. Both true.
Some will call jazz America's greatest artistic gift to the world.
Others will read in it a tragic tale of racism. For them, not even
a triumphant Ella Fitzgerald dazzling the crowds at a White House gala
could ever silence the haunting, anguished voice of Billie Holiday singing
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Or consider the international craving for the music of
Jay-Z, Nas, and Outkast. Hip-hop is a cauldron of creative literary
experimentation unmatched anywhere in the English-speaking world.
Censorious, two-bit pulp hack Lynne Cheney might not get it, but
Seamus Heaney does. (As obviously would anyone who writes of
Lil' Kim with such grace: "Like a calf freshly born on the pale
fields of Mossbawn, she shimmers with the newness of life, staggers wetly,
and speaks to the sky.") The rap-loving Nobelist is not alone.
Hip-hop has caught the ears of millions of youths worldwide and
taught them that America produces powerful art that speaks to them.
The rub is that hip-hop, the idiom of the ghetto, can--and will--be
invoked with equal ease as an ode to America or as Exhibit A
for all that's wrong with it.
EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN LIMBAUGH
The Brits lap up foreign barbs, the Germans practice contrition,
and the Russians make a fine art of self-deprecation. Meanwhile,
to the keen eye trained in the art of national stereotyping,
Americans can appear unjustifiably thin-skinned and allergic
to self-criticism.
First, the allergy. This country's moral certainty and
unflappable optimism are part of its extraordinary charm.
But moral certainty is one short step away from moral blindness.
The civil rights movement, for example, highlighted
America's admirable capacity to right its wrongs.
It is cause for celebration in history textbooks.
But absent a collective reflection on the moral failure that necessitated
such righting in the first place (and which, judging from
the portrayal of Arabs in the media, is still alive and kicking),
one ends up with the weird spectacle of jubilant self-congratulation
drowning out humility and atonement--as though our moral failings
were just God's way of giving us opportunities to demonstrate
our moral superiority. The lesson from Abu Ghraib? Rumsfeld put it best:
"The system worked!" [24]
With Walter Lippmann's "manufacture of consent" hard at work
in the mainstream media, criticism of the consensual--say,
foreign policy--is routinely dismissed by the right and a segment
of the liberal spectrum as hostile (rather than wrong) and unpatriotic
(rather than misguided): reactions more conducive to paranoia
than self-inquiry. Last year's fury at France for daring to get
in the way of Bush's perfect little war engendered reactions ranging from
the goofy (freedom fries), to the self-flagellating (spilling
French wine in the street), to the unhinged (congressional bill
for repatriating dead GIs buried in France): all in all, more Prozac
Nation than Home of the Brave.
To blame the hypersensitivity on 9/11 alone would be missing the
forest for the trees. Anti-Americanism has long had on these shores
a self-referential quality of the sort it enjoys in Europe--though
for entirely different reasons. Anti-Americanism blends the conceit
of an "ism" with the paranoid style dear to Hofstadter.
In particular, it reminds one of an Abbie Hoffman quip turned on its head:
"Just because they're out to get you does not mean you're not paranoid."
Anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Communism
have a shared history of sky-high readings on the Richter scale
of American paranoia.
For a glimpse of the paranoid style in full regalia, welcome to the
loopy world of right-wing talk radio. Brimming with "talent on loan
from God," the shows are spoken blogs without the links--sonorous
tableaux of undiluted narcissism. The mechanics are well oiled:
A cult leader, known in the trade as "the host," blabbers on
endlessly about the ghastly horrors that liberals and foreigners
have in store for true-blue, patriotic, God-fearing Americans.
The host usually speaks from a position of moral strength, being himself
a recovering alcoholic (Glenn Beck), a drug addict (Rush Limbaugh),
or a convicted felon (Gordon Liddy, Oliver North).
But, hey, what would repentance be without sin?
First in the firing line of the master blabberer are the
Blame-America-Firsters, those vile, guilt-ridden fifth-columnists
who reflexively see in their own breed the root of all evil.
Their tormenting is not done Grand Inquisition style. Far from it.
The genius of the genre is to serve a vulnerable audience
(mostly, insecure white males stuck in traffic) a perfect cocktail
of humor, common sense, and paranoia.
That such an unlikely melange actually works is a thing of beauty:
The paranoia, predictably, feeds on a vision of lazy,
amoral purveyors of negativity who, having abdicated all sense
of personal responsibility, maunder on with stultifying seriousness
about the joy of the entitlement society. As the cult leader sees it,
theirs is a Bizarro world where a cup of hot coffee at McDonald's
is worth 50 cents if spilled into your throat and 3 million dollars
if spilled into your lap. Infusing the blather with humor is a clever
ploy meant both to entertain and to draw a contrast with
the dreary world inhabited by the Political Correctness brigades:
those insufferable bores who, in their relentless pursuit of
sainthood, long ago discarded like so much excess baggage
old-time frivolities such as smiling, laughing, and
calling a spade a spade.
Don't be fooled by the laughs. For all their fixation on freedom,
right-wing talk shows are microcosms of totalitarian life.
Limbaugh's rule is sunny fascism: the triumph of jovial either/or
thinking (if thinking is the word). All truths are deemed self-evident;
therefore, dissenting views are not errors of judgment but of character.
Reality is screened and twisted to fit the dogma, and assertions
are validated by mere force of repetition. Add on top of that
generous servings of hate, paranoia, scapegoating, and buffoonery,
and you get a winning combo close to Mussolini's heart.
Fair enough. But the right-wing paranoia, the existential fears?
What's that about? Why the obsessive talk about freedom in a land
that has never known tyranny? Why the insatiable appetite for
defense spending when the enemy rides donkeys and sleeps in caves?
Could it be the collective memory of immigrants fleeing persecution?
Or the propensity of a God-fearing frontier people to live in, well, fear?
MULTICULTURAL INSULARITY
First, the facts. America lives in a friendly neighborhood.
No invasions by hordes of barbarians (besides the Mexican fruit fly).
The nation most successful at killing Americans on the battlefield has been,
by far, the United States. All of its foreign wars combined have yet to match
the number of military deaths in the Civil War alone [25].
Which is not for lack of trying. Between 1945 and 2001, the US initiated
nearly 200 aggressive military incursions, none of them having anything
to do with defense [26]. (In a nice Orwellian twist, the Department of War
renamed itself the Department of Defense in 1949 [27].)
The low casualty count on the American side speaks of technological
superiority and geographical good fortune. Not all have been so lucky:
60 percent of all French males between the ages of 18 and 28
were killed or maimed in the First World War [28].
(Presumably, the moniker "cheese-eating surrender monkey" refers
to the other 40 percent.) In no foreign war has the equivalent American
statistic ever exceeded 5 percent.
Notwithstanding 9/11, the US gets little of the world's wrath.
It does not get much of its culture either. At least not in native form:
Foreign movies generate a negligible box office take; fewer than 3 percent
of books published in the US are translations (no better than in the
Arab world); and the music market is, after Pakistan, the world's
most insular [29]. America can be maddeningly provincial. And yet,
buffeted by cross-cultural winds, it is more cosmopolitan than
any nation on earth. Not much of a paradox actually. Americans
welcome foreign cultures, so long as they are local: Gloria Estefan
rather than Los Van Van; "The Joy Luck Club" rather than
"Raise the Red Lantern"; Hollywood remakes of foreign box office hits
rather than the real thing.
America doesn't go to foreign cultures. Foreign cultures come to
America, uprooted, transplanted, and denativized. Just as keeping
a lion as a house pet will spice up your life without teaching
you much about the jungle, immigrants have enriched this nation without
improving its capacity to look outward. In Governor Ma Ferguson's
eternal words, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,
it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas [30]."
Ma's insular legacy lives on: Only 5 Americans in the entire State
Department are fluent enough in Arabic to be interviewed on TV [31].
The provincialism of a superpower is not without consequences:
America's quagmire in Iraq has provincial cockiness written all over it.
FINAL STOP, AMERICA
In popular US anthropology, humans come in two varieties:
the lucky folks who are American and the unfortunate ones
who wish they were. Sticklers for logic will point to a third category:
foreigners with no aspiration to join in the American dream.
These wretched souls bear the cardinal sin of anti-Americanism, which is
to deny the Homo Americanus his self-perception
as the unique final destination of human civilization.
(Francophobia is the opprobrium leveled at the chief sinner.)
This nation's tortuous relationship with the "Other"
(ie, the 6 billion people trapped in foreign lands)
goes back to the roots of the American experience.
To the immigrant newly arrived on Ellis Island,
who, looking back upon the ocean, thought of the ones left behind,
the Isle of Hope was just as often the Isle of Tears. Touched by
residual survivor's guilt, Americans easily see in the "Other" reminders
of their own good luck--that most fragile of blessings.
The same fragility is evident in the phrase
"American dream." For, from a dream, must one not eventually awake?
Hawk-eyed right-wingers who see anti-Americanism everywhere
trumpet their patriotism with the insecure zeal of the convert.
Why? Perhaps because immigrants, like converts, bear an original
sin of disloyalty. Being original, of course, the sin is purely
imaginary and therefore cannot be expiated. This is why
American-ness, like manhood, must be proven--again and again.
To be American is not an attribute but a commitment
and a badge of honor. As such it is under the constant
threat of loyalty-laden modifiers: -un, -non, -anti.
Taking Kagan's logic to a place we probably don't
want to go, Venus knows she'll never lose her womanhood
in battle. Mars, on the other hand... The pledge of allegiance,
the flying of the flag, the cult of the 2nd Amendment: These are
the American worry beads that Mars needs to finger daily.
SO WHAT?
Paul Johnson got it partly right; a quarter right to be precise.
Anti-Americanism is, indeed, a disease that targets
neurotic intellectuals and Europeans wary of US lifestyle.
But it is also an immune reaction--if sometimes
overblown--to a US foreign policy that too often confuses self-interest
with benevolence; subservience with democracy; meaning well
with doing good. It is, too, a growing skepticism toward the
image--burnished in the Bush years--of a shallow, violent
society projecting its insecurities onto the world.
The fourth part of the anti-American edifice is its imaginary wing.
Henry James once observed that Americans are "the most addicted to
the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy
to under-value them." Once the last anti-American has departed
this earth (don't hold your breath), rest assured that anti-Americanism
of the imaginary sort will still thrive; for it is, courtesy of
the paranoid style, a self-sustaining life form.
The life form acts as a multiplier: paranoia that influences
policy that fuels anti-Americanism. It has been rumored that
Evangelical Christians--many of them devout followers of the
commandment "Thou shalt be paranoid with Jesus"--have guided
President Bush in our hour of darkness. On the face of it,
a flashlight might have worked better. The insufferable
self-righteousness oozing out of every pore of the Bush White House
has had a way of translating into disastrous policy.
It will be the main challenge for future presidents to reverse
this course. As Raymond Aron once remarked to a German friend,
"The 20th century could have been your century." Collective paranoia
helping, it was not to be. A hundred years from now, will we
Americans hear from our friends, "This could have been your century"?
If we do, at least we'll know why.
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REFERENCES
[1] https://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/017.html
Anti-Americanism Is Racist Envy, by Paul Johnson, Forbes.com,
July 21, 2003.
[2] https://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm
[3] https://www.fas.org/irp/threat/terror.htm
[4] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0522_030522_lightning.html
Key to Lightning Deaths: Location, Location, Location,
by John Roach, National Geographic News, May 22, 2003.
[5] https://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=439
[6] https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/srilanka.html
[7] L'Ennemi Americain: Genealogie de l'antiamericanisme francais,
Philippe Roger, Paris, Seuil, 2002.
[8] Anti-Americanism, by Jean-Francois Revel, Encounter Books, 2003.
[9] French Opinion and the Deteriorating Image of the United States,
by Richard Kuisel, Georgetown University, Manuscript 2003.
[10] US Department of State, Europeans and Anti-Americanism,
September 2002.
[11] https://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=185
Views of a Changing World 2003,
The Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 2003.
[12] Soft Power, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., PublicAffairs, 2004, page 35.
[13] https://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
Power and Weakness, by Robert Kagan, Policy Review, June 2002.
[14] https://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040823crat_atlarge
The Big One, by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 23, 2004.
[15] https://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_05_02_dish_archive.html#108372659219579373>
The Daily Dish, by Andrew Sullivan, May 5, 2004.
[16] https://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_newsfile/0,10987,1101691205-216180,00.html
[17] The Sorrows of Empire, by Chalmers Johnson, Henry Holt and Co., page 4, 2004,
and The U.S. Global Empire, by Laurence M. Vance, LewRockwell.com, March 2004.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance8.html
[18] https://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206
A Year After Iraq War, The Pew Research Center, March 2004.
[19] https://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html
US Looks Away as New Ally Tortures Islamists,
by Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian, May 26, 2003.
[20] https://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/08/17/Turkmenistan.ages/
Turkmen Leader Redefines Ages of Man, CNN, August 17, 2002.
[21] https://www.varsity.utoronto.ca/archives/118/dec10/review/friedman.html
The Life and Times of Thomas L. Friedman, by Noah Stoffman, Varsity Publications,
Inc., December 9, 1997.
[22] https://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/politics_of_envy.htm
The Politics of Envy, by Paul Hollander, The New Criterion, Nov. 2002.
[23] Soft Power, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., PublicAffairs, 2004, page 124.
[24] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11263-2004May8.html
McNamara Moment, by David S. Broder, The Washington Post, May 9, 2004.
[25] https://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm
[26] https://www.nationbooks.org/book.mhtml?t=vidal
[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_War
[28] The Collapse of the Third Republic, by William L. Shirer,
Simon and Schuster, 1969, page 142.
[29] https://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar142004/fp7.asp
America is a Cultural Fortress, by Scott Timberg, Deccan Herald, March 14, 2004.
[30] https://www.mythome.org/quotes.html
[31] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/politics/05DIPL.html?ex=1391317200&en=f3a15d4a7e760f80&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
U.S. Image Abroad Will Take Years to Repair, Official Testifies,
by Christopher Marquis, The New York Times, February 5, 2004.
