Mike the Mad Biologist

Nobody Likes Us

Posted by Mike on July 27, 2006
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From Reuters:

In South Korea, traditionally a U.S. ally, two-thirds of people under 30 said in a recent poll that if there were war between North Korea and the United States, they would side with North Korea.

“Anti-Americanism runs deeper and is qualitatively different than in the past, when it was largely attributable to unpopular U.S. policies,” Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, says in a new book on the subject, “America Against the World.”

The sad thing is that the Bushists don’t even care…

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Comments

  1. #1 Michael Poole
    July 27, 2006

    Anti-Bushists clearly don’t care either, because they’re too busy whining about President Bush or his supporters to do any useful analysis about the root of modern anti-Americanism or to make useful suggestions about how to solve it.

    I don’t think individual behavior is a significantly contributing factor to anti-Americanism, and I don’t think changes in individual presentation can significantly mitigate it.

    I suspect that the root cause is still unpopular U.S. policies — but in a rather pettier form than in the past. As far as I can tell, the U.S. has lately been willing to take decisive action before everyone in the U.N. agrees that the particular action is necessary; this offends people who care about the color of the bikeshed and often wish they (or their country) could decide on the bikeshed instead. I don’t think there is a solution to this problem other than for people generally to behave more maturely than they do.

    The other likely cause is that the U.S. is the only real policy superpower, and people (irrationally) dislike it now more than when the USSR was a unified counterbalance acting against the U.S.. There is still a push against actual U.S. policies — rather than their timing — but it is not centralized in one place. Instead you have guerilla movements in Africa, a few hard-line Arab countries, a South American despot or two; together they can have as much influence as the USSR ever did, but the U.S. looks like an eight hundred pound gorilla in comparison to any one of them. This factor has an alternate solution to people behaving more rationally: for the US to go isolationist, at least in terms of policy. Although some policy pressure could be exercised by citizen groups through market forces, the likely downside of isolationism exceeds the likely benefits in both the short and long term.

  2. #2 Circumvision
    July 27, 2006

    Very cogent response, MP. The George Soros decision to form a European planning group to try to oppose US economic and political dominance in the world is a closer-to-home example of reflexive anti-americanism—-by a naturalized american! He put a big part of his fortune into defeating Bush, and Soros lost his bet. Now he’s going to show Bush!

  3. #3 Boubou
    July 28, 2006

    One problem is that a lot of people all over the world associate American people with American government.

  4. #4 skunqesh
    July 29, 2006

    “One problem is that a lot of people all over the world associate American people with American government.”

    yeah, and a lotta people make the same mistake here in the US. But BushCo is doing everything they can to fix that.

    and yes.

    that was snark.

  5. #5 sex shop
    April 15, 2009

    thanks for all