People around the world look to the United States and the American people in much the same way Americans look to celebrities in sports, film and television. They are looking for a beau ideal to emulate. They want us to set an example, to show the world the best a nation can be, the best a people can be. And just as Americans suffer disillusionment and anger when their heroes prove to have feet of clay or commit embarrassing acts that make the papers and the evening news because they have invested so much emotional capital in them, so do the people and nations of the world react when the United States makes an ass of itself, either through incompetent performance or through the faux pas of its leaders, particularly the President. They don't like being let down by their hero any more than Americans do.

Although Curious George - an apt description of George W. Bush, given the behavior of the monkey in Hans A. & Margret Rey's classic stories - deserves a large portion of the blame for the dislike and disdain being heaped on us even by people and nations allegedly friendly to us, the problem did not start with him. It began with Bill Clinton.

As I said, the less well off countries, and even our First World contemporaries, have bought into the American Dream as promulgated by our movies, novels and TV shows that are marketed all over the world. These all say that if you come to America, you can become anything you want to be; you can rise as far as your skills and merit will take you. Oh sure, luck does play a part, but it's your competence that ultimately matters. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, as Sinatra said about the entertainment biz in New York City. So when they see America foul up in the world forum, they get mad at us.

Slick Willy failed to respond effectively to the genocide in Rwanda; to the bombing of the USS Cole, to the bombing of our embassies in Africa, to the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center, to the bungled raid on Mogadishu, Somalia shown in the book and movie Black Hawk Down, to the many charges laid against him during the Monica Mess and subsequent impeachment. He caused the stock many people set in American competence and skill built up from World War II on through the Space Program, lunar landings, and the move into the Information/Computer Age that we had built up, that didn't fall all that far even during Vietnam, to take a real drop.

Then along came Curious George. Like his cartoon namesake, it seems he can't do anything right. He couldn't pick the right enemy after 9/11. He invaded a country that anyone with half a brain could tell him was neither connected to nor supported al-Qaida, that the Islamists hated as much as the United States because not only were they a secular society, but they were fellow Muslims who damned well knew better. Then, after invading Iraq and toppling the dictator Saddam, he couldn't even secure the country and instead bungled us into the longest war we've been in since World War II. He got us mired down in another quasi-guerrilla war like the early days of Vietnam, which we know from past experience is a tough kind of war to win. He had to have been told that the way to win that kind of a war is to detach the people from the guerrillas by making their lives better and showing we aren't there to conquer and occupy your country, but just to set you back up so's you can take care of yourselves and run your own country (democratically, of course - this strongman stuff you lived through is so 19th Century). He had the gall to nominate grossly unqualified people for positions of great importance, and get called on it by his own people. Couple that with the Republican Party's messing about with the laws, letting the banks go crazy with loans and mortgages that should never have been made in the first place, and then presiding over those chickens' coming home to roost and damage our economy, and Curious George is the one who deserves to take the fall. Uncle Sam goes from looking like a man who got mugged in the street, with his coat all dusty, a black eye and a bent striped top hat, to looking like a circus clown in gigantic fakefeet who can't take a step without taking a pratfall. Most of the fuck-uppery happened on his watch, committed by him and his minions, so he deserves the blame.

That's why they all suddenly seem to hate us. America, thanks to two buffoons in a row who had no clue how to use American power in the marketplace and in the realm of realpolitik effectively, has gone from being a nation to respect, to being the nation that opens the show for Ringling Brothers. And nobody wants a clown as their beau ideal. It's just that simple.

oh, it didn't start with Clinton. They were scared shitless of Reagan too(Iran/Contra, anyone). And they would have been scared of Bush Sr, too, but Bush Sr's handling of the Iraq/Kuwait situation was VERY diplomatic-- no "mission creep". Bush Sr. was actively seeking credibility and "diplomatic capital" to use in the Israel/Palestine peace process.

Ultimately, Bush Sr.'s method of diplomacy was considered repudiated by the fact that he got absolutely nowhere with Arafat.

Bush Sr's handling of the Iraq war was the exception, not the rule. It looms large in people's minds because we are back in Iraq today, and, of course, it was the first major post-cold-war action taken by the United States.

Here's an important essay about the 1991 gulf war:

<link>

The US was working the diplomacy angle HARD. And they had to because we had a LOT of cold war skeletons in the closet, some rather fresh.

Actually, Europe's dislike of the US started long before the Twentieth Century. Read Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit to see how Europe's intelligentsia viewed America during the second half of the 19th Century. Charles DeGaulle wasn't exactly one of our great friends, although we did pull his chestnuts out of the fire in World War II.

Freud couldn't stand the US. The Islamic hatred began back in the 50's, during what we now think of as a period of suffocatingly moral behavior in the US. And it was the culture that was hated then.

Living under high expectations sucks.

Ever see "Cool Hand Luke"? It's the "what we have here, is a failture to communicate" movie. In it, Luke's recovering from yet another thrashing from the guards and the other prisoners are gushing over him, asking what he's gonna do next, when he yells:

"Quit feeding off of me! Think for yourselves!"

Of course they are angry at him for this, but is it just? Is it fair to scream at the A student for getting one C, but letting the D student keep getting away with Ds and saying nothing? To dump all the chores on the responsible kid while letting your other 4 brats do nothing, then screaming at the one good kid when he/she makes a mistake?

I wouldn't be suprised if Americans are beginning to resent the U.S.'s role as world policeman as much as the Europeans do.

You (not you, you in general) think we're such horrible, evil people? Fine, you handle the Balkins, you handle Iran, you handle a neo-Tzarist Russia.

See if they'll endure your sanctemonious wining.

(Not saying this is right, but it is human. Americans are human, we're not supermen, we're NOT PERFECT.)

Tony Blair warned of this a while back, the danger of America "disengaging, pulling up the drawbridge".

Yeah, we need to do things better, but we need to stop having Utopian expectations of perfections dumped upon us as well as accepting them.

If your standard is perfection, you'll always be disappointed.

The disliking of America may not have started with Bush, but it wasn't a majority position in our closest allies' societies until we went bugfuck insane over the possibility of queers entering into long-term, state-sanctioned, committed relationships and gave the idiot in chief a bottle of electoral whiskey and the keys to the national car. I suspect that if we ever start acting sanely, by, e.g., renouncing the use of torture as a legitimate investigatory tool, we will rapidly reclaim most of the lost amity.

Surely the point is that us Europeans resent the US partly because of the US's assumption that they should act as the world policeman. It is easy to resent the invasion of American culture because, in English speaking countries, American culture is ubiquitous. But we have only ourselves to blame for this.

But when the US takes this cultural colonialism and adds to it the assumption that they can, unilaterally, sort out problems anywhere in the world. Then this smacks of real colonialism.

In this context, if you really want to understand the attitude of Europeans to the USA then you need to go back to the effects of the Marshall plan and the worries that accepting aid would reduce Britain to simply a satellite of the USA.

An irony is that the nations that complain the loudest about the USA being the worlds' policeman are the ones who benefit most *from* that policing.

It's easy to be a pacifist nation with an anemic, non-deployable military while living under the Aegis of American military might, after all.

Again, if asked, I bet we would be happy to leave. Europe can handle Iran, Islamic terrorisim, China, and Russia all by themselves, right?

Thing is, if Europe can't handle a 4th rate bully like Serbia, why should the USA have any confidence in Europe's ability to wage war or conduct serious foreign policy, when they've refused to do so for their own interests on their own continent.

It's embarrassing that US soldiers and planes had to be flown from halfway around the world to handle a problem no more than 200 miles from Rome.

It's only gotten worse since the wall came down. There was a piece in the LA times a while back on how the UK, a praiseworthy exception who's actually contributed sizable military contingents, cut their navy down to no more that a coastal defense force.

Is America acting unilaterally, or is the west abdicating national defense to the USA while simultatiously cursing them for it?

Will it get to the point where we're the only western nation with a deployable military that can actually fight wars overseas?

If that happens, what if americans finally do throw down their "world policeman's" badge in disgust and anger and let a now impotent and unrealistically pacifistic Europe handle problems they haven't really had to worry about in decades?