Matt Yglesias makes the solid point that ought to be much more obvious to most people than it is that someone’s attitudes towards a country and his opinion of the merits of that country’s government’s foreign policy need not have anything to do with each other.  Arguing for Sarkozy’s relative anti-Americanism (or lack thereof) or Brown’s relative pro-Americanism (or lack thereof) is fairly pointless, since both men can admire things about America (e.g., pro-market economic policies, relative independence of the central bank, etc.) and may even like to visit America (as Brown does) without endorsing any of the policies that most Europeans of all political persuasions find dreadful.  (It is a sobering reality that some of the most robustly pro-Bush European leaders tend to be ex-communists from the old Warsaw Pact–such is the reality of the neocons’ much-vaunted, mythical “New Europe.”)  The problem is definitional: if you consider any criticism of U.S. policy by foreigners proof of their “latent” or “strong” anti-Americanism, you have already confused things hopelessly.  There is virtually no more culturally pro-American people in Europe than the Germans, but just because Germans love stories about the American frontier doesn’t mean that Germans want to endorse the next generation of New Frontier foreign policy. 

It was good for a joke to find out that Richard Perle liked to vacation in the south of France, but this actually helps put his contempt for French foreign policy in perspective.  There are few more triumphalist creatures on the planet than the American tourist abroad, and it stands to reason that someone who routinely vacations in another country will tend to develop–perhaps as some strange coping strategy–distorted opinions about everything related to that country.  In fact, it seems probable that someone who sees a country through the eyes of a tourist, even someone who regularly summers in another country, will probably come away with a far more negative assessment of that country’s government and its policies than someone who has never been there.  Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.  On the other hand, stunningly ignorant, provincial members of the administration share the contempt towards Europeans of their ocean-hopping associates, so sometimes there’s no telling.