Anti-Americanism Update

There are some posts that should be required reading. This one, in which the Done With Mirrors blog examines Josef Joffe’s book on American foreign policy, is one of them. An excerpt:

My German friends especially tell me to just get used to the fact that America is going to be hated and resented, rationally or not, simply because it is powerful. But the taint of irrationality makes the resentment too easy to dismiss. Joffe expresses it well:

Anti-Americanism, Mr. Joffe argues, can sometimes be as complex, paranoid and all-encompassing as anti-Semitism. "Like the Jews who were simultaneously denounced as capitalist bloodsuckers and communist subversives, America gets it coming and going," he writes. It is puritanical and self-indulgent, philistine and elitist, ultrareligious and materialist. When it does not intervene, say, in Rwanda, it is wrong. When it does intervene, it is accused of naked imperialism.

[HT: Michael Totten ]