Price Floyd traces the decline of America’s standing in the world to this moment. “Back then, the USIA transmitted American values—and this was separate from selling American policy,” he said. “The two aren’t separated now. There’s no entity that makes it possible to separate them. So, if you disagree with our policy, which is easy to do now, then you hate America, too.” ~Fred Kaplan, Slate

I take Mr. Floyd’s point, and I think he is mostly right at least as far as government activity is concerned. It isn’t as if there are no other means of communicating to the rest of the world except by way of government, but I acknowledge that he is talking specifically about how the government does or does not successfully engage in public diplomacy.

This also highlights the terrible practical problems with a “values”-driven idealistic foreign policy or anything called the “Freedom Agenda.” When you take it as axiomatic, as Mr. Bush’s Second Inaugural did, that “our interests and our values are one,” you have prepared the ground for a continual identification of interests, values and policies that supposedly seek the former and allegedly protect the latter. As far as the state is concerned, the government’s policies are the embodiment of both American interests and values. To oppose or criticise that policy is to declare that you are somehow against one or both. To claim that foreigners resent U.S. policy is, for a foreign policy idealist, to say that they resent America; to say that policy causes terrorism (which it can and does do) is to say that America by its very nature causes terrorism. The special relevance of this conflation of “values” and policy for the recent dust-up between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani is obvious.

In this roundabout way, the idealists reason. We can understand how a foreign policy idealist probably genuinely believes that “they hate us for our freedoms,” because for him “our freedoms” involve the “freedoms” of, say, backing the Aliyev dictatorship in Azerbaijan or the “liberties” of selling munitions to Israel or the “rights” to launching aggressive wars against small, weak countries with which we have no real quarrel. Hegemony is itself an expression of freedom; our bases are extensions of our “values” and our cruise missiles the expression of our ideals.