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.

¹ 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.

As the Pew surveys show, Americans differ from others on a wide range of issues, from terrorism and preemptive war to morals and “lifestyle.” Most of these differences are unsurprising: Americans are less worried than Europeans, for instance, about global warming, and do not share European anxieties about the Americanization of culture and ideas. Other contrasts cut deeper and are more worrisome. Europeans now tend to hold the same view as Muslims not only about the invasion of Iraq but increasingly also about the war on terror. In 2004, majorities in France and Germany felt that American motives were not to be trusted in the fight against terrorism; of these skeptics, most believed that the main American impulses were to gain control over oil supplies, to support Israel, or even to achieve world domination. The same suspicions are voiced by most people even in such ostensibly friendly Muslim countries as Turkey, Morocco, and Jordan.

One fact emerges very clearly from Kohut and Stokes: attitudes toward Americans are not necessarily linked to specific actions that the United States takes. Nearly 80 percent of Indonesians, for example, approved of the U.S. disaster-relief operation in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in 2004. Yet anti-Americanism in Indonesia actually grew during the same period. What this means is that a shift in American foreign policy is unlikely to reverse or even to affect the tide of anti-Americanism. The mere fact of American power, combined with a readiness to use it in defense of American interests, seems enough to damn the United States in the eyes of many. Even when American power is deployed for their benefit, the gesture is either re-interpreted as malign in intent or is somehow disconnected from the dominant paradigm of American omnipotence and malevolence.

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Obviously, it is vital to distinguish between friendly criticism and hostile antipathy, or between what I would call pragmatic anti-Americanism and fundamentalist anti-Americanism. The former is a hostility that is or purports to be based on actual experience and observation, and is usually local, i.e., focused on particular incidents or traits. An example might be the British brigadier general who recently expressed harshly critical comments about his U.S. colleagues in Iraq, alleging that they were too influenced by Hollywood imagery and too eager to imitate figures like John Wayne.

These observations relied heavily on stereotypes and ignored differences in public expectations of senior officers in British and American forces. But they could also be tested and, if untrue, refuted. Moreover, even if the British general was right about the particular U.S. commanders he encountered, it is possible that his experience was atypical and that his generalizations were therefore unwarranted. Presumably all this would carry weight if pointed out to him.

In short, pragmatic anti-Americans are in principle open to persuasion on the basis of countervailing evidence. Whether they actually do change their minds depends, needless to say, on many things, including their temperament and general disposition. In practice, it is true, few people find it easy to admit error: experience hardens into prejudice, and prejudice often disguises itself as experience.

But that brings us to the more extreme and clearly much more common form of contemporary anti-Americanism, namely, the fundamentalist kind. Here the hostility is nothing less than an article of faith, impregnable to reasoned discourse. An example: at a Catholic Easter retreat I attended this year, there was a discussion about the seven deadly sins. One group had been asked to name examples of pride. The group leader wrote on the board: “George Bush and Osama bin Laden.”

This woman took it for granted that nobody in the room would question her implied moral equivalence between the leader of the free world and the free world's arch-enemy, or between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the American response to them. In this she was correct: nobody did question or contradict her, especially when, in explaining her choices, she reminded the group that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were a symbol of American arrogance and unearned superiority. This was a highly educated woman who had devoted many years to charitable projects in the third world and particularly in the small Pacific country of East Timor, which had endured massacre and oppression at the hands of Indonesia. It made no difference to her when it was pointed out that the United States had played a leading role in forcing the Islamic Republic of Indonesia to grant independence to the Christians of East Timor.

The distinction between pragmatic and fundamentalist anti-Americanism is one that Americans themselves, out of understandable feelings of defensiveness, sometimes find it difficult to uphold, tending occasionally to label instances of the former as evidence of the latter. Nevertheless, as Kohut and Stokes show, Americans actually tend to be harsher in their judgment of themselves than are any of their European critics. This habit of self-criticism often translates into a willingness to see America through the eyes of others, and to adjust one's behavior accordingly. McDonald's, for example, has recently been running an advertising campaign in the Guardian, Britain's most viscerally anti-American newspaper, with the slogan, “Everything McDonald's Does Is Questionable.” Presented in question-and-answer format, the ads address charges that McDonald's hamburgers contain harmful additives, that the company exploits its impoverished workers around the world, and the like. The premise of the campaign appears to be that Guardian readers can be persuaded by such an exercise in self-examination to reconsider their own hard animosity toward an iconic American brand name.

In many ways, indeed, America Against the World exemplifies the same self-critical mindset, making it a very American book. Thus, only an American would title a book documenting the rise of global anti-Americanism with a phrase suggesting that Americans are against the world rather than the other way around. Only an American would conclude (as the subtitle implies) that Americans are disliked because they are “different.” And only an American would assume that anti-Americanism is within America's power to eliminate.

But that is indeed what Kohut and Stokes seem to believe. Although they do not fully credit the idea that Americans “seek to save, reform, or convert the world in their image, as many people around the world fear,” this fear, they suggest, is completely understandable as a response to the policies being pursued by the present American government. (In their words: “From the reluctant superpower with quasi-isolationist leanings in the 1990's, the United States has morphed into an assertive hyperpower.”) That being so, the way to respond to the wave of global anti-Americanism is to reverse U.S. foreign policy, presumably by loosening the Republican grip on the White House and Capitol Hill.

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It is here that the authors' unspoken political agenda shows most clearly, and most unconvincingly. For the glaring fact about anti-Americanism—a fact that every scrap of data in this book tends to confirm—is that in its prevalent form it is both incoherent and insatiable. Even if the United States were inclined to countenance appeasement of its enemies, as Kohut and Stokes all but explicitly advise, the demands of its anti-American critics are too numerous, too self-contradictory, and too all-consuming to be satisfied by anything less than an utter American abasement and, indeed, defeat.

A case that illustrates both the pathology and the propagandistic power of fundamentalist anti-Americanism is that of the British playwright Harold Pinter, winner of last year's Nobel Prize for literature. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Pinter declared: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

Noteworthy is how Pinter simply takes for granted the major premise of his argument—the enormity of the alleged crimes of the United States—while focusing his listeners' attention on the minor premise, namely, that few have talked about them. The latter claim is as false as the former: no nation's actions, real or imagined, have been subjected to such microscopic investigation, or to such popular mythologizing, as those of the U.S. government and its agencies. But it is much easier to insinuate a conspiracy of silence than to present evidence of the so-called crimes themselves. And it is flattering, too—as if Pinter's audience were being let in on a well-guarded secret to which he alone has had access.

If, moreover, someone were to object to Pinter's wild allegations of American diabolism by recalling some instance or other of the benign use of American power, Pinter is ready and waiting with an answer. As he put it in his Nobel Prize speech, “You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good” (emphasis added). And then he called upon the world's beleaguered right-thinking people to rise to their duty: “I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all.”

Here is where true pathology enters in. Pinter's mind, it appears, is not merely closed, but hermetically sealed to the point where his own “real” truth has occluded reality itself. His case demonstrates that anti-Americanism is not merely the ideology of fools; even people of great talent and intelligence can be possessed by its demonic power. Thus does perhaps the most famous living dramatist in the English-speaking world, a man who has just been awarded the highest accolade that the republic of letters can bestow, seize the occasion to assail the very power—American power—that guarantees the freedoms on which his entire glittering career has been built.

I doubt whether Harold Pinter could renounce his obsessive anti-Americanism even if he wanted to. Any rational calculus of America's impact on the rest of the world—political, cultural, economic, even environmental—would conclude that, on balance, the United States has been overwhelmingly a force for good. But such a calculus is irrelevant to the fundamentalist, for whom it is axiomatic that the United States is the ultimate cause of the world's evils. To abandon this belief would require a radical revision of one's entire view of the world. How many fundamentalists are capable of doing that?

Nor is Pinter's case, despite its outré flavor, so atypical of the European norm. Once no more than an expression of the Old World's condescension toward the New, European anti-Americanism has soured into a deep-seated resentment that is reckless of cause and consequence, and that diverges not only from fact but from rational self-interest. This resentment is ultimately fueled by the long-term decline in European power. But it also arises from a failure (or a refusal) to come to terms with the fact that the United States rescued Europe three times in the last century: in both world wars, and then again during the cold war. Faced now by another common danger—global Islamist jihad, using as its instruments both terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction—from which again only the United States can save it, Europe has gone into denial, and worse.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that the same crisis that gave rise to the new, fundamentalist anti-Americanism in Europe has also exposed the failure of European unification. That project had been predicated on a desire to emulate the power and influence of the United States; but Europe has instead been disunited and impotent, incapable of dealing with the localized Balkan crisis of the 1990's and lately with the global challenge of Islamist jihad. As progress toward a United States of Europe has ground to a halt, flummoxed most recently by last year's “No” votes on the European constitution, anti-Americanism has, for many, come to replace the hollowed-out ideologies of the past: social democracy, Communism, fascism, and now even Europeanism itself. Unable to define itself positively, Europe (as the data collected by Kohut and Stokes show) has come to define itself negatively, by what it is not—that is, America.

In his book, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005), the British writer Mark Leonard, formerly an aide to Tony Blair, claims that “American hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction, and is already driving its own retreat.” He is not alone in this prediction: apologists for the European Union still believe the American mission to spread democratic values is bound to fail, and some among them welcome that eventuality as the prelude to a new, European world order. Given that, by the middle of this century, as much as 70 percent of the European Union's adult population will be aged sixty or over, the chances seem remote that such hopes will be realized. But, so far, the anger and resentment behind them, based not on rationality but on delusion, show no signs of receding.

Added to all this, finally, is Western Europe's demographic crisis: not one of the continent's indigenous peoples is reproducing at replacement level. As is well known, this is what has created the economic pressure for mass immigration, which in turn has resulted in the proliferation of urban ghettos everywhere. Muslims who have settled in Europe often retain their own powerful animus against the United States, reinforced by moral disapproval of many aspects of American culture. And this animus, even though based in many cases on otherwise unfamiliar and deeply disquieting religious doctrine, has entered symbiotically into a kind of common consensus with the attitudes and beliefs of many secular Europeans.

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But this raises a more general question concerning the source and nature of fundamentalist anti-Americanism, one on which Kohut and Stokes hardly focus but which seems to me to go to the heart of the matter. My readers may already have noticed a certain family resemblance between the relatively new prejudice of anti-Americanism and the world's “oldest hatred”: namely, anti-Semitism. This resemblance is not accidental. Structurally, the two do indeed have much in common.

² Both hatreds are impervious to the objections of logic or the evidence of history. In both, prejudice functions as a matrix of self-justifying, holistic conspiracy theories that substitute for rational thought. Both rely on fantasies about power and influence, discerning hidden patterns, concocting atrocity stories, gliding over inconvenient disconfirming facts.

Of the two, anti-Americanism would seem the easier to invest with verisimilitude. The United States actually is the most powerful country on earth, and so can more plausibly be blamed for anything and everything. Jews, on the other hand, make up such a minuscule proportion of humanity that anti-Semitism can seem inherently illogical to those not already disposed to believe it. But, precisely because it is not even remotely anchored in reality, anti-Semitism is also capable of accommodating any evidence that appears to contradict its assertions. Thus, after the Holocaust had made overtly racist prejudice against Jews beyond the pale in Western societies, anti-Semitism mutated into anti-Zionism—a metamorphosis that has enabled purer forms of anti-Semitism to regain respectability in public and academic discourse in the West.

But the resemblance goes beyond the structural. I would contend that the most important single reason for the emergence of a new, lethal, and even genocidal form of anti-Americanism is the conflation of attitudes to the United States with attitudes toward Jews. Put simply: anti-Americanism has become a continuation of anti-Semitism by other means.

How has this deadly confluence of prejudices come about? Two strange bedfellows are primarily responsible: radical Islam and the secular Left, in improbable alliance. Within Europe's large Muslim population, as America Against the World confirms, many draw an explicit linkage between American support for Israel and what is perceived as Jewish control of American politics and society. In this they are not unusual: virtually all Muslims, Kohut and Stokes find, believe that the United States is biased toward Israel. Two-thirds of Jordanians and one-half of Moroccans believe that Jews have greater influence over U.S. foreign policy than does business, or the military, or indeed any other element in American society. Among European Muslims, such assumptions are axiomatic.

If they are not yet axiomatic among Europeans themselves, they are on the way to becoming so. This is especially the case in European universities, where Israel has long been demonized and, more to the point, anti-Zionism now merges seamlessly with anti-Americanism. According to Kohut and Stokes, popular opinion in Europe has gradually been moving in a similar direction: both the British and the French tend to side against Israel and with the Palestinians, while most ordinary Europeans believe that American policy is too favorable to Israel. It is thus hardly surprising that two American professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, should earlier this year have chosen a European journal, the London Review of Books, in order to propagate their thesis that the “Israel Lobby” controls American policy in the Middle East, or that the thesis should have garnered immediate support from such prestigious British organs as the Financial Times.

Even before this endorsement from the heart of the American academic establishment, however, European anti-Americanism had become contaminated with the anti-Zionism and outright anti-Semitism that are ubiquitous on the Left, where “neocon” is a euphemism for “Jew” and anti-capitalist conspiracy theories have a long pedigree of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. Even more strikingly, there is a growing tendency for both Israel and the United States to be blamed not only for their own actions but even for the actions of their Islamist enemies. Europe, it is claimed, would not have become a target for terrorists in the first place had it not allowed itself to be associated with the “crusaders [i.e., Americans] and Zionists” targeted by Osama bin Laden.

Kohut and Stokes's data help us identify still another key factor in the melding of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Europe. This is the belief that U.S. support for Israel is “faith-driven.” Outraged by the paradox that American religion is still thriving in the midst of material prosperity, secular Europeans cleave to the idea that Christian evangelicals, inspired by a kind of millenarian crusade, and in league with a Jewish cabal, are driving American support for Israel. Many firmly believe that they are thereby being dragged into a clash of civilizations, and they profess to be terrified by the prospect. In the words of the Economist, an unfailing barometer of the European consensus, “War for oil would merely be bad. War for God would be catastrophic.”

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In reality, of course, U.S. foreign policy is customarily driven neither by cynical nor by millenarian motives, but—as is the case with most states—by enlightened self-interest. The Bush doctrine is a rational response to dire necessity. The Bush administration, moreover, is the first to have made the creation of a Palestinian state an official goal of U.S. foreign policy. If there seems lately to have been a shift on this last point, it is due to such perfectly rational factors as unrelenting Palestinian terrorism, Israel's disengagement from Gaza, and the rise of Hamas.

Nor do most Americans agree with Europeans that their foreign policy has been kidnapped by alien forces. According to Kohut and Stokes, attitudes toward Israel are influenced more by what Americans read and see with their own eyes than by where or how they pray. The values and interests shared by Americans and Israelis are rightly important to both peoples—too important, thankfully, to be sacrificed in order to appease the appetites of those who share neither.

What all this suggests is that anti-Americanism is not going to go away any time soon. Neither a change of policy nor a change of administration will put an end to a phenomenon that has developed its own insidious dynamic. If Kohut and Stokes's surveys are to be believed, many well-meaning Americans seem prepared to ascribe this global hostility to simple envy. Unfortunately, they have not taken in the dimensions of the hatred directed toward them, especially in Europe, or the degree to which it is now pervaded by the stench of a lunatic anti-Semitism. The vilification of America and Israel, of “crusaders and Zionists,” reiterated constantly by Islamists, is now echoed by European politicians of the extreme Left (like George Galloway) and the extreme Right (like Jean-Marie Le Pen), and in softer form has been incorporated into the ideas and attitudes of large elements of European society.

Are there ways, if not of stopping it entirely, at least of mitigating the effects? More vigorous public diplomacy on the part of Washington and its friends could help, I believe, by reaching those in Europe whose anti-Americanism is still essentially of the pragmatic variety but who need to be armed with facts and arguments on the other side. So might a campaign against anti-Americanism in European universities.

But I would also like to see the Bush administration mount a counteroffensive. Fundamentalist anti-Americanism is now increasingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, with its harping on the supposed “Jewish influence” on Franklin D. Roosevelt. The arguments of today's anti-Americans may not be so unsophisticated, but neither are they any the less vicious than those of yesterday's Nazis and Communists. If the insurgency of evil ideas is to be turned back, they need to be both confronted and answered. Like Israel, the United States has nothing to hide, and is in the right. It is past time to say so, and to say why—honestly, forthrightly, everywhere, and often.

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¹ Times Books, 259 pp., $25.00.

² Natan Sharansky discusses aspects of this resemblance in his “On Hating the Jews,” COMMENTARY, November 2003.

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