Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Recipient Addresses:

Separate each address with a comma.

Your E-mail Address: Message:

Since the United States was attacked five years ago, and despite a very brief interlude of sympathy for the lives lost on September 11, anti-Americanism has increased sharply around the world. A nadir was reached during the invasion of Iraq in 2003; since then, there has been only a slight recovery of favorable opinion, limited to some countries. Even in Britain, America’s closest European ally, the proportion of those with a positive view of the United States fell from 83 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2005. Anti-Americanism is strongest in Muslim states—and also in Western Europe, even in countries that are longstanding NATO allies. It is most virulent among the young.

These and other facts emerge starkly from a new book, America Against the World: Why We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked, by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes. Kohut is a veteran pollster; Stokes worked for the Clinton administration. The book’s foreword is by Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State. If this, and the book’s subtitle, suggest a certain tilt in the book’s agenda, the suggestion is correct—a point to which I shall return in discussing the authors’ conclusions. But one does not have to agree with those conclusions to find America Against the World useful. Kohut and Stokes have put together a uniquely valuable collection of data, based on 91,000 interviews conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project in over 50 countries around the globe. The surveys cover every aspect of anti-Americanism while also comparing the attitudes of Americans themselves on a variety of subjects with those of the rest of the world; the results make for sobering reading.

---

© 2010 Commentary Inc.