Juan Cole

AHR Forum

Anti-Americanism: It's the Policies

Explaining anti-Americanism is more difficult than it may seem on the surface, and the phenomenon itself is far more varied and complex than can be conveyed by the stock image of rallies in the global South demanding that the Yankees go home. Each of the articles in this AHR Forum focuses on a particular geographical region (Latin America, Europe, and Asia) and advances an explicit or implicit thesis about the nature of anti-Americanism. Among the main explanations for hostility toward the U.S. have been rejection of democratic ideals and preference for various forms of authoritarianism. Given that the United States has been a democratic success story for more than two centuries, this line of thinking concludes, it is necessary to critique it if classic liberalism itself is to be discredited.

Other authors have argued that hostility toward the United States is generated not by fears of its uncontrolled grassroots politics, but by foreign policy stances taken by U.S. elites, which have an impact on publics in the rest of the world that those publics perceive as negative. Yet another common thesis is that the rapacious and unrestrained character of American capitalism alarms observers abroad, especially in a globalizing world where U.S. monopoly practices can have an immediate and wide-ranging impact.

The authors in this Forum attempt in various ways to complicate these easy narratives of perfidy and hypocrisy, of irrational fear and calculated self-interest. All put forward theses about the nature of the phenomenon in their area of the world. I have been assigned the task of commenting on these arguments, and also of injecting the Middle East into a discussion that for the most part touches on it only tangentially. Do the Middle Eastern cases cast any light on the generalizability of the authors' perspectives, which have been arrived at by consideration of other regions of the world?

In Greg Grandin's essay on anti-Americanism in Latin America, a fourfold distinction is made. There are American liberal and universal ideals, with Jefferson, Whitman, and FDR instanced. Then there is American imperial power, often exercised in ways starkly contrary to the country's stated ideals. Likewise, there is the Latin American perception of the central ideals of the United States, and the Latin perception of Washington's deployment of brute power in the hemisphere. Grandin quotes authors on the right, such as Jean-François Revel, to the effect that anti-Americanism seeks to "discredit liberalism" by "discrediting its supreme incarnation." That is, these authors argue that anti-Americanism springs from the rejection of individual liberties, democratic governance, and free market capitalism. Grandin argues that this definition is one-dimensional, defining the United States only with regard to its constitutional ideals, and missing the complexity of the Latin American critique.

That complexity is underlined at the beginning of Grandin's essay with regard to Guatemalan activist Humberto Alvarado Arellano, a communist whose response to heavy-handed U.S. intervention in his country and the rollback of the social reforms of the 1940s was to turn to the poetry of Walt Whitman. In some sense, America the ideal survived in his mind America the calculating cold warrior, which backed dictatorship, death squads, and repression (a repression that helped end his own life in 1971).

Grandin argues that "anti-Americanism" as it came to be used by elite writers in the U.S. during the Cold War was indeed deeply imbued with ideology. Whereas much anti-American political activity in Latin America, he alleges, came in response to Washington's support for dictators and strong men, American ideologues attempted to blunt the force of the critique of actual policy by claiming that the opposition derived instead from dislike of high American values. The Latin dissidents themselves, in contrast, tended to define themselves not as "anti-American," but rather as "anti-imperialist" and anti-racist, and they seldom lost sight of a pan-American universalism to which the ideals of the United States heavily contributed. In this reading, "what is often taken for anti-Americanism in Latin America is, in fact, a competing variant of Americanism."

Although Grandin tends to focus on the Latin American censure of Washington's heavy-handed and calculating interventions in the Southern Hemisphere, the fourfold grid of the analysis allows for a subdued admission that some Latin writers did critique not only imperialism but also liberalism, as Revel would maintain. Thus, Grandin admits that they often contrasted Spanish Catholic spirituality and aesthetics with Anglo-Protestant notions of secular individualism and utilitarianism. Likewise, the Latin left, whatever its attitude to the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, often despised the corporations and free market entrepreneurs that sought profits in Latin American markets, automatically equating such activity with exploitation and repression. These admissions are, however, most often elided in the argument of the article, which instead insists that "Over the course of two centuries, it has not been clashing universalisms that served as the primary fault line between the two Americas, but how the expansion of the United States' political and economic power fractured a shared sense of exceptionalism."

Grandin shows that the phenomenon of overbearing American institutions was hardly a figment of Latin activist imaginations. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller recognized the discontents generated by U.S. corporate sharp practice in the region. Grandin argues that the 1940s were a sort of golden age in which the U.S. government under Roosevelt accepted "hemispheric pluralism," foreswore military intervention, and was even known to side with Latin Americans against overly rapacious U.S. corporations. With the end of World War II, however, the United States went back to supporting coups to ensure "stability," and during the Cold War it intervened widely in both politics and social policy in the name of stopping the spread of communism. Grandin concludes his essay with a quote from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who argued with regard to Iraq that "we need to go into the heart of [the Arab] world and beat their brains out, frankly," and then "partner with them" to "build a decent and different Iraq." Grandin is convinced that given the failures of the U.S. in Latin America, where at least there was a shared belief in Americanism, the prospect that such a project can succeed in the Middle East is low.

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht's analytical approach is very different. She concentrates on a distinction between cultural anti-Americanism and political anti-Americanism, and argues that the relative strength of the two varies with the historical period. She also insists on a dialectical approach, such that anti-American and pro-American impulses struggle with each other within each of the major political currents on the Continent over time. She argues that anti-Americanism has been as strong on the European right as on the left, and that it would be difficult to separate out the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of the phenomenon. In the end, however, she believes that European anti-Americanism is primarily a cultural orientation, and that its political aspect is a mere mask. The American model is ultimately a cultural model, and governments in countries of all ideological stripes have rejected it over time.

Gienow-Hecht holds that after the failure of the French Revolution, the U.S. was the main model for the republican variant of Enlightenment values in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and so, as in Latin America, an ideal of Americanism was often shared by European liberals. Before World War I, she says, it was mainly conservative elites and competing commercial interests in Europe who expressed alarm about the United States. (She earlier had acknowledged anti-Americanism in Marx and Engels and their followers, but appears to discount it as unimportant in this period.) In the twentieth century, every decade brought its own concerns about the U.S., from Fordism in the 1920s to economic instability and depression in the 1930s. As Gienow-Hecht shows, each theme generated both positive and negative appraisals in a variety of political movements. (She even finds some philo-Americanism among Nazi thinkers who admired the country's industrial might and techniques.) The U.S. as symbol of capitalist modernity and urbanized mass society both fascinated and repelled Europeans on the left and the right.

Gienow-Hecht, it seems to me, tries so hard to sustain her thesis of a dialectical relationship within each movement and country between anti-American and pro-American sentiments that she is in danger of insufficiently stressing the vast difference between the generally pro-American Weimar Republic and the anti-American Nazis, or between the views of intellectuals in the French Third Republic and the stridently anti-American and nativist Vichy.

She maintains that only with the advent of the Cold War did some Europeans adopt anti-Americanism as a key part of their political ideology, as opposed to their cultural orientation. (This conclusion, which dismisses the anti-Americanism of interwar communist and fascist parties as merely cultural, strikes me as not entirely convincing.) She continues to emphasize the anti-Americanism of French and German parties on both the left and the right during the Cold War, mainly articulated, she says, as a critique of the disjuncture between the constitutional ideals of the U.S. and the brutality of its foreign policy in the Third World and its brandishing of weapons of mass destruction on European soil. She points to a growing anti-American sentiment among the young in the 1970s and 1980s. She is careful to use opinion polls to show, however, that pro-American feelings remained powerful, often even in the same political currents that denounced the U.S. She argues that the polls conducted between 1975 and 1983 reveal that 30 percent of Western Europeans were pro-U.S., 10 percent were reliably anti-American, and the rest declined to take sides except when pressed. If asked whether the United States or the USSR represented the greater threat, 64 percent of Germans in the 1980s said Moscow, and half maintained that the U.S. was Bonn's greatest friend.

Ironically, many of the things that Europeans, from Malta to Greece to Turkey, object to in American cultural influence are the same issues that enrage the religious right in the U.S. itself—concerns about Hollywood films and secular values, the weakening of the family, and urban alienation. Some of the critiques of the United States by European communists, of unrestrained individualism and consumerism, sounded a good deal like those of U.S. evangelists. With the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the question of international institutions and human rights, Gienow-Hecht says, political anti-Americanism has again come to the fore, overshadowing the cultural anti-Americanism of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.

Gienow-Hecht's dialectical approach and emphasis on culture seem to me in the end less successful than Grandin's analysis of Latin Americans' negative assessments of the United States. She has relatively little to say about American investment and corporate presence, about the way Washington used loans to pressure postwar governments, and about occasional American anticolonialism (e.g., Algeria and the Suez Crisis) as a complicating factor in U.S. relations with the European right. Rea-ganite and post-Reaganite neoliberalism and hostility to unions, as well as growing tolerance of monopolistic practices in Washington, are also key sites of European critical thinking about the United States. Economics and hard-edged politics, it seems to me, were more important than she allows, even at the level of the public as opposed to political elites. Her emphasis on a dialectic of competing pro-American and anti-American currents within each political movement and within each country makes it hard for her to come to clear conclusions about the weight of each in many instances, and it is their relative weight at any one time in any one political current that is at issue. Finally, it seems to me that she could have usefully brought out more fully the impact on Europeans' feelings about the U.S. of their perceptions of and experiences with its rival, the Soviet Union, and the implications of the latter's fall.

Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker argue that both perceptions of who Americans are (i.e., their values and way of life) and perceptions of U.S. policy in Asia have combined to affect Asian attitudes toward the United States. Their historically grounded treatment begins with the poor impression made on Asia by U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, which was brutal and heavily inflected with blatant racism (although not as universally as the authors imply, with Arthur McArthur and other officers sometimes an exception). They also discuss the Chinese Exclusion Acts and limitations on Japanese immigration, although it is likely that the Japanese in Japan understood the impulses behind the latter all too well. Initial Asian hopes that the United States would form a counterweight to the imperialism of Europe gave way to bitter disappointment, in Mao Zedong and others, when it turned out that Wilson's "14 Points" were not intended to be taken seriously for non-European populations, and when it transpired that the U.S. was as imperialist as the older powers.

The authors point to the Soviet Union as an instigator of anti-American sentiment in the Chinese Communist Party after 1928, with the result that the CCP condemned the U.S. as "one hundred times worse than England or Japan." The instigation was successful in part because it accorded with Chinese experiences of U.S. policy. Nevertheless, liberal reformers in both China and Japan during the interwar period often continued to look to America as a model and success story. In Japan, that admiration declined in the 1930s and 1940s as the Japanese government demonized the United States, but Japan-U.S. conflict actually helped America's image in China.

Cohen and Tucker see four main developments as fashioning attitudes toward the U.S. in Asia during the Cold War. These were the rise of communist regimes in China, North Korea, and Southeast Asia, the benign character of the U.S. occupation of Japan, the vast increase in the American economic presence in the region, and the growing egalitarianism in the U.S. itself, leading to the gradual removal of race-based immigration restrictions. Anti-Americanism was led on ideological grounds by the communists, socialists, and Islamists, but conservative elites in East Asia and India joined in on other grounds, decrying the vulgarity of American culture and the perils of unrestrained individualism.

In the two decades after World War II, say Cohen and Tucker, Jim Crow and violent responses to the civil rights movement gave Asians the firm impression that white Americans were racists, and Asian experiences in the U.S. sometimes did little to counter it. (The authors have little to say about racist attitudes within Asian societies themselves, and the ways those sentiments may have shaped perceptions of the U.S.) Likewise, expanding U.S. power in the region transformed the image of the United States into that of an imperialist power for many Asians, with U.S. military bases and rowdy GIs a poor argument to the contrary. Trade frictions and overbearing U.S. trade treaties, which often attempted to dictate domestic policy, were a further irritant. U.S. anticommunism may have cemented Washington's alliances with Asian governments and entrepreneurs, but its willingness to resort to propping up military dictatorships, in Korea and elsewhere, as bulwarks against Marxism also contributed to a souring of public opinion toward the United States.

Cohen and Tucker's essay focuses primarily on East Asia but does occasionally have things to say about South Asia. They turn to Pakistan, and posit that the 1979 Khomeini revolution in Iran was a turning point in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, because in 1979 the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was burned down. This hypothesis is incorrect; the vast majority of Pakistanis are Sunni Muslims, who had little sympathy for Khomeini's Shiite vision of rule by mullah. Rather, the attack on the U.S. embassy was sparked by inaccurate rumors that the Americans had had something to do with the takeover of a mosque in Mecca by Saudi religious dissidents that same year. The authors note Pakistani hostility to the Reagan administration's bombing of Libya, but mysteriously neglect the elephant in the living room—the alliance of the CIA and the hard-line Pakistani Islamists in a jihad against the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan. As for India, Cohen and Tucker note that much negative public opinion toward the U.S. in that country, as reflected in polls, had to do with a perception that the U.S. economic system was exploitative and grasping.

Cohen and Tucker conclude that anti-American street demonstrations in most of Asia during the twentieth century typically had nothing to do with attitudes toward the U.S. political system of democracy and free elections, but rather derived from rational local responses to the perceived damage done to Asian publics by specific U.S. foreign policy initiatives.

They argue that the fall of the Soviet Union saw, for the most part, a replacement of ideological struggles with a renewed nationalism in Asia that was often critical of the sole remaining superpower—whether the issue was bases in the Philippines or Okinawa, the continued division of the Koreas and the aggressive stance of the U.S. toward Pyongyang, or, for China, U.S. support for Taiwan. They conclude that after September 11, as well as before, the major source of anti-American attitudes was not hostility toward the democratic system but a pervasive perception of hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy, whereby the country failed to live up to its own high standards. The Bush administration's virtually unilateral invasion of Iraq universally lowered its poll numbers throughout Asia, often quite substantially, because it was seen as a betrayal of the U.S. commitment to national self-determination for all and of a commitment to the rule of law.

Perhaps in no region of the world have U.S. interests suffered more from public anti-Americanism than in the Muslim Middle East (excluding Israel). The hostility of Middle Eastern publics to the United States in the opening years of the twenty-first century is perhaps unparalleled in the entire world. According to Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post, polling by Zogby International showed that the proportion of the Egyptian public holding a negative view of the United States increased between 2002 and 2004 from 76 percent to 98 percent.¹ A poll released on June 13, 2006, by the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed that even after opinions of the U.S. improved following its humanitarian intervention to help victims of the late 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, views in the Middle East edged lower again in 2006.² In Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey, respectively, 27, 15, and 12 percent of the public expressed a favorable view of the U.S. in 2006, in comparison to 23, 21, and 23 percent the year before. The regimes of all three countries are strong geopolitical allies of the United States, with Turkey a member of NATO and Jordan a non-NATO ally. But their publics clearly would not put the U.S. ambassador at the top of their invitation list for any galas they planned to throw.

But do these negative views reflect a clash of civilizations or a dislike for democracy? The answer is clearly no. The World Values Survey at the University of Michigan, run by Ronald F. Inglehart, found that in Muslim nations (Albania, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey), 87 percent of the public approves of democratic ideals, and 68 percent approves of the way democracy actually performs as a governmental system.³ Despite negative views of the U.S., around half of Turks and Moroccans say that those who move there will have a better life.⁴ The Revel thesis that anti-Americanism derives mainly from hostility to U.S. democracy and free market capitalism does not hold much water. When asked, Middle Eastern publics are not shy in saying precisely what they mind about the United States. Before 2003, it was what they considered to be a foreign policy criminally slanted against Palestinian victims of Israeli expansionism. After 2003, it was the Palestinian issue plus what they see as the brutal American occupation of Iraq. Linzer writes of 2004, "Those polled said their opinions were shaped by U.S. policies, rather than by values or culture. When asked, 'What is the first thought when you hear "America"?' respondents overwhelmingly said: 'Unfair foreign policy.' And when asked what the United States could do to improve its image in the Arab world, the most frequently provided answers were 'Stop supporting Israel' and 'Change your Middle East policy.'"

The modern Middle East was forged in a dialectic of European colonialism, nationalist revolt, and postcolonial conflict. France in Algeria, 1830–1962, is emblematic of the arrogance of Western power, in the struggle against which twentieth-century Middle Easterners forged their political identities. The French neglected their Algerian subjects, let them starve in the famine of 1866–1871, brutally repressed uprisings, and brought in a million settlers to usurp the best land and economic opportunities; and when the Algerians arose to struggle for independence in 1954–1962, the French did not scruple to commit a sort of genocide, killing hundreds of thousands. After decades or in some cases more than a century of European political and economic dominance, Middle Eastern publics came to see national independence and cultural authenticity (often coded as Islamic law and practice) as inseparable components of what they call "democracy." Polls show that although they strongly support free elections as the best system, if they had a choice between elections held under conditions of foreign occupation or an indigenous dictatorship, a substantial number would choose the latter hands down.

After World War II, the United States gradually supplanted France and Britain as the major power in the region. Fairly or not, many Middle Easterners transferred their grievances toward and distrust of Paris and London to Washington. Initially, under FDR and Eisenhower, the U.S. showed substantial sympathy for local nationalist aspirations and urged the end of colonialism, lest local populations go communist as a means of throwing off the foreign yoke. Roosevelt met with the Moroccan sultan in 1943 and encouraged Morocco's independence from France. Eisenhower intervened against the conspiracy by Britain, France, and Israel to take down Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1956, saying that their war of aggression endangered the ideals of the United Nations. Eisenhower also twisted the arms of the French to decolonize in Algeria, threatening to call in Paris's substantial postwar debt to the U.S.

But where Eisenhower feared an onslaught by the left, he did not scruple to intervene in a neo-imperialist way himself, as he did in overthrowing the elected government of Iran in 1953 over the oil nationalization issue—something for which Iranians have never forgiven the U.S. He also invaded Lebanon in 1958 to forestall a mostly imaginary demarche by communists or Arab nationalists. A new, muscular American interventionism was driven by anticommunism on both sides of the ledger—fear that bourgeois nationalists might go communist if decolonization was delayed, but determination to crush those nationalist movements that had already drifted to the left.

The nexus of local conflicts and Cold War alliances powerfully shaped local attitudes toward the United States. As the U.S. allied more and more strongly with Israel under Johnson, Arab regimes began to seek other support. Abdul Nasser welcomed Khrushchev to Cairo in 1964 and became more explicitly a Soviet ally. Syria likewise increasingly warmed to Moscow. Libya after 1969, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, Algeria, and Baathist Iraq all developed close ties to the Soviet Union, such that both regimes and their publics came to be critical of the United States. There were two brakes on Cold War anti-Americanism in the region. First, many Middle Eastern regimes and publics were more afraid of the spread of communism than they were of U.S. influence. Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf mostly had good relations with the U.S. throughout this period. Second, the U.S. was so wealthy and powerful that there was a constant temptation to establish dealings with it, as Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat did in the 1970s, turning Egypt into a Washington ally.

The Arab-Israeli conflict increasingly polarized the region, especially from 1967, when the Arabs were humiliated during the Six-Day War, and Israel occupied Jerusalem (Islam's third-holiest city) and thereafter ruled as a colonial power over the stateless Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. As the Israelis began colonizing the occupied territories in earnest, they evoked shock and outrage throughout the Muslim world, and as it became clear that the United States would do nothing practical to stop this project, it earned a share of the hostility directed by Arabs and Muslims toward the Zionist state.

How to make sense of these attitudes? One researcher found, in a tight statistical study, that anti-Americanism in Pakistan in the late 1970s was driven by only two big issues: whether the United States lived up to its promises of foreign aid, and whether it supported Pakistan versus India in the central political conflict that consumed the Pakistani public. The gradual U.S. abandonment of its earlier alliance with Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s, the adoption of a stance of neutrality in the Indo-Pak wars, and the reduction and then cutoff of U.S. aid were statistically the independent variables in anti-American attitudes.⁵ The third issue—the impact of the metropolitan power on local autonomy—did not arise in this study, but I think it is obvious from the polling done in the Middle East that it is absolutely central to phenomena such as anti-Americanism (or, during the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, anti-Sovietism).

Most countries have enemies, and humans seem to like binary ways of thinking, of which the Cold War was a prime example. Conflicts between India and Pakistan, Israelis and Arabs (or Muslims), and China and Taiwan all center on geopolitical fault lines where overlapping claims on territory galvanize larger political allegiances. U.S. relations with China improved when Washington adopted the "one China" formula. One source of anti-American feeling in the Middle East is clearly that the U.S. is siding strongly with one party in such a grand binary geopolitical struggle. All of Israel's opponents and critics of its treatment of the Palestinians thereby bear some degree of resentment toward the United States. This resentment does not necessarily mean bad diplomatic relations with Washington. But whereas regimes might moderate their displeasure with the U.S. in order to gain strategic rent, for instance, the Egyptian public has no reason to pull its punches with the pollsters.

The United States can sometimes offset this hostility by being perceived as a generous friend in crisis. Thus, both Indonesians and the publics of many other countries had a better opinion of the U.S. after it clearly made major efforts to help the victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Likewise, the U.S. got a slight bounce in the polls in Pakistan for diverting military helicopters from Afghanistan to help the earthquake victims in Pakistani Kashmir. The substantial amount of foreign aid that the United States gives Egypt, in contrast, appears to have no positive effect on public opinion, although it is true that much of that aid is military or structured in such a way that ordinary Egyptians see little of it. What the Egyptian public sees as the neo-imperial policies of the U.S. in Palestine and Iraq outweighs the value of simple aid. For those Egyptians, probably not a majority, who deeply dislike the Mubarak regime, the fact that it is propped up by the U.S. is also a sore point.

After such a long time spent under often exploitative Western domination, postcolonial publics in the Middle East simply do not trust Westerners to rule Muslims benignly. In the 2004 Pew Global Attitudes poll cited above, 61 percent of Pakistanis, 70 percent of Jordanians, and nearly half of Moroccans expressed the belief that Iraq would be worse off after Saddam Hussein fell and the Americans took over. They also for the most part approved of suicide bombings against Americans in Iraq. Clearly, they consider the country to be occupied by a foreign power—the United States—and Middle Easterners on the whole view that as a fate worse than death, against which taking extreme measures is entirely understandable.

The three main determinants of Middle Eastern perceptions of an outside power such as the United States, then, are which side it takes in the Arab-Israeli struggle, how much it is perceived to contribute to economic development in the region, and whether it promotes or detracts from the national autonomy of regional states.

The polling done in the Middle East and Pakistan suggests ways of looking at sentiments about the United States in the other regions considered in this Forum. Take Europe, for example. The United States' Marshall Plan helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II, for which many Europeans of that generation remained grateful. The grand binary geopolitical struggle in Europe in the postwar period was obviously the Cold War, and so the generally high marks that West Germans, for example, gave the United States throughout this time clearly had to do with their alliance with Washington. (The less some Europeans, such as the left, feared the Soviet Union, the less reason they had to view the U.S. favorably.) The enormously important place that the U.S. had in Western European politics and the economy, however, did detract from national independence, and so generated some degree of anti-American feeling. (Sentiments against the influence of "vulgar" American mass culture, which are common in the Middle East as well, would come under this heading.) In the post–Cold War period, Europeans are forging a new union and feel protected by the rule of law and international coordination, and they clearly feel that warfare without UN sanction is illegal. The unilateral, almost rogue foreign policy of the Bush administration in Iraq and elsewhere has put Washington on the wrong side of this new binary. The U.S. has also ceased contributing much to Western Europe, and indeed is a net debtor. "What have you done for me lately?" might be an apt question for Western Europeans to ask Washington.

The polling in all four of these regions tells us that anti-Americanism is anything but an essentialist cultural phenomenon. It is highly volatile, and sensitive to the changing weight of these major variables. Pew found that in 1999, late in the Clinton administration, some 75 percent of Indonesians had a favorable view of the United States. By 2002, in the wake of the war fought in Afghanistan after September 11 by the Bush administration, that number had fallen to 61 percent. When Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Indonesians' opinion of the United States plummeted to 15 percent. When the Americans proved so helpful after the tsunami, it rebounded in 2005 to 38 percent. But by the spring of 2006, the slow grind of bad news from Iraq and, courtesy of Aljazeera, Palestine had sent the numbers down again, to 30 percent. The U.S. did not change its way of governing or its basic value system, at least domestically, during this period, but the numbers have bounced up and down like a yo-yo. Some of this volatility, moreover, may come from the new vigor of Indonesia's relatively free press and freewheeling democratic debate in the wake of the demise of the military dictatorship. What is indisputable is that the sentiments are not generated by a clash over basic values. It's the foreign policy, stupid.

Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1984. He is author of The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Contemporary Iraq (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Sacred Space and Holy War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002). His weblog is Informed Comment (http://www.juancole.com/).

Notes

¹ Dafna Linzer, "Poll Shows Growing Arab Rancor at U.S.," Washington Post, July 23, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7080-2004Jul22.html (accessed July 24, 2006).

² "America's Image Slips, but Allies Share U.S. Concerns over Iran, Hamas," June 13, 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252 (accessed July 24, 2006).

³ Pippa Norris and Ronald F. Inglehart, "Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis," Comparative Sociology 1, no. 3/4 (2002): 235–264.

⁴ Pew Research Center, "A Year after Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists," March 16, 2004, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206 (accessed July 24, 2006).

⁵ Shafqat Hussain Naghmi, "Pakistan's Public Attitude toward the United States," The Journal of Conflict Resolution 26, no. 3 (September 1982): 507–523.

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