The US was hated during its isolationist periods and under its pacifist presidents. ~Janet Albrechtsen

This isn’t really true.  There is a later claim in this article that Carter was as despised by Europeans as Bush is now, which is simply not the case.  There is a real difference between a sort of cultural condescension towards the rude Yanks, which prevailed in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the loathing of America that we see widespread around the world today.  It has three primary causes.  The first of these is indisputably bad U.S. policies–or at least those policies that virtually everyone else in the world regards as bad and detrimental to their interests.  The second is globalisation, which people around the world experience and perceive as Americanisation in so many areas of life.  They associate, whether fairly or not, all of the difficulties of economic modernisation and rapid change with America, since firms from or associated with our country represent a large part of the financial, commercial and entertainment sectors.  The third is the overwhelming imbalance in military power and the increased tendency since the end of the Cold War to use that power pretty much at the drop of a hat.  Vedrine spoke of the “hyperpower” in the days when Clinton would launch military strikes all over the world seemingly on a whim.  American supremacy was really almost entirely unchallenged in the ’90s, which led to an excess of activist meddling. 

This was precisely not the response to America that prevailed in the interwar period.  In Germany of the 1920s, the slogan was wir amerikanisieren uns (we are Americanising ourselves), because there was a tremendous appreciation in interwar Germany for the technological and economic successes of America.  In one of our most “isolationist” periods, as the ignorant insist on referring to the interwar period, the people we helped defeat in WWI sought to imitate America in most things.  In our pre-WWI days, our Presidents and officials were honoured as great supporters of international law and brokers of peace.  President Cleveland was one of the leading defenders of arbitration as a means of settling disputes; President Roosevelt was feted for his role in negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.  As Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan received some of the warmest welcomes any of our ministers have ever enjoyed.  Indeed, back in those days, it was our role to hector and berate the British hegemon when it engaged in excessive and destructive policies.  The anti-Britishism (if there is such a word) of Americans during the Boer War would make the Churchill-loving stooges among our modern militarists blush with shame.  Americans used to be the neutral nation that would lecture the great powers of the world on their abuses of the other nations of the world.  Much of what is called anti-Americanism is no different in principle from the opposition that our ancestors expressed to British imperial abuses and aggressions.  Americans were once repelled by displays of hubris and disregard for international law, and so now our government’s displays of the same offend and appall other nations. 

Europeans and others may never have exactly liked us or our culture, but there was a time when they respected us.  As soon as we strode onto the stage as a world power in WWI and began dictating terms, no matter how benevolently or wisely (and often there was too little of both), we began to incur the resentment of other peoples.  Inevitably, as the preeminent political and economic power after WWII, we encountered even more opposition.  There was an attempt, however clumsy at times, to hide that supremacy.  Like Augustus acting as a first among equals, superior only in his personal auctoritas, most of the time America at least attempted to not rub other nations’ noses in their own relative weakness.  In this last ten years or so, Washington has made it its business to insult and degrade as many major powers or former major powers as possible.

There are cases where resentment of America is purely irrational and our country is being made the scapegoat of local problems, but so much of “anti-Americanism” today is entirely within our power as a nation to reduce by ceasing the destructive, obnoxious and exploitative policies that provoke these resentments.  There will always be a certain level of resentment that goes with being a wealthy and powerful country, but how we make use of our wealth and power can make all the difference in blunting that resentment or increasing it and sharpening it into violent hostility.