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Anti-Americanism

Yglesias and Drezner have a conversation about the French election and have an interesting exchange over anti-Americanism in Europe.  Yglesias thinks it’s overhyped and largely centers around Iraq, Drezner doesn’t.  I tend to agree with Yglesias on this point, though he does flub the point a bit when he conflates France and Germany as both […]

Yglesias and Drezner have a conversation about the French election and have an interesting exchange over anti-Americanism in Europe.  Yglesias thinks it’s overhyped and largely centers around Iraq, Drezner doesn’t.  I tend to agree with Yglesias on this point, though he does flub the point a bit when he conflates France and Germany as both having had “leaders of the right” c. 2002-03.  The point is that the French and German people are generally not exuberantly and vehemently anti-American in the sense that they despise America and Americans and all our works.  Quite the contrary in many cases.  “Anti-Americanism” in the way many people use it today simply means, “So-and-so doesn’t endorse U.S. foreign and/or trade policy and is therefore anti-American.”  It is possible for there to be people who couple the critique of policy with a general rejection of everything to do with America (Hugo Chavez comes to mind), but even many European social democrats can find things about America they like–these just happen to be things that are not being stressed as much or as often as they would like.  It is lucky for us that the ties with the U.S. and reservoirs of goodwill of European peoples exist to sustain relationships between America and Europe that foolish governments on both sides of the Atlantic will try from time to time to abuse or sever as they see fit. 

It seems to me that Drezner also fumbles when he says that realists don’t care about public opinion.  They don’t care about it in the way that people who want to intervene on behalf of the longsuffering democrats of Uzbekistan (or wherever) care about it, but they acknowledge that it is a relevant factor in the domestic politics of other nations and they recognise that domestic politics can and will shape the definition of another nation’s foreign policy, though perhaps it will never radically reshape it in ways that make the actions of foreign governments highly unpredictable.  It seems to me that it is the realists who are quite concerned about widespread hostility to American policy among different peoples around the world, because they recognise that this poses a threat to U.S. interests in the long term, while it is interventionist-cum-idealist view that other nations’ anti-Americanism is just a function of their governments spewing out propaganda on the assumption that there could not be anything that “we” have done that would merit such opprobrium.  In the latter view, “anti-Americanism” (i.e., opposition to U.S. policy) is created and whipped up by foreign governments and would otherwise be much more mild.

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