WASHINGTON: After the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the big question here was, “Why do they hate us?”

Still, the attacks unleashed a wave of solidarity with the United States around the world. French President Jacques Chirac, for example, was the first foreign leader to visit the wreckage at the site where the World Trade Centers’ collapsed. Three months later, when US troops helped oust the Taliban in Afghanistan, the voices of protest were very few indeed.

Now, 21 months after those fateful attacks, almost all the sympathy and support that poured forth on Sept. 12, 2001, have evaporated into thin air as the aggressive unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration has transformed Washington’s image from one of a well-intentioned — albeit clumsy and uninformed — superpower, to one of a self-righteous and aggressive global bully.

That was the message of a major survey of public opinion after the Iraq War in 20 foreign countries, released this week by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. The results not only confirmed a phenomenal decline in the how foreign publics see the United States since Bush became president in January 2001, but also provoked renewed debate among the foreign-policy elite here over, “why do more of them appear to hate us more”?

“Something I never, ever thought I would see is the fear of American power,” said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the Pew results, particularly its findings that majorities in seven of eight predominantly Muslim countries, including Kuwait and Indonesia, feared that their nations could be the subject of US military action.

Strong majorities — ranging from 57 percent in Germany to 76 percent in France — in five of seven NATO countries said they favour a more independent relationship with Washington on diplomatic and security matters than has prevailed in the past. The only exceptions were Britain and Italy.

“There is a growing resentment out there, and it cannot be in our interest to have much of the world hoping ... that we’re going to stumble,” said Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute and author of a new book on US foreign policy entitled Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.

One clue to the problem emerged on Thursday during a debate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between Chinese-born scholar Minxin Pei and Francis Fukuyama, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School for advanced International Studies and author of the famous End of History published a decade ago.

While the debate was devoted to the issue of US nationalism, the Pew survey loomed large over the proceedings. Could it be, the packed audience wanted to know, that the nature of US nationalism, particularly as expressed in Bush’s policy and rhetoric, contributed substantially to the precipitous decline in US popularity around the world?

Pei, a scholar at Carnegie who just published an article on the subject in Foreign Policy magazine, saw a direct correlation between the rise in anti-Americanism and the nature of American nationalism, which he argued is unique among the great powers for being based on a “political creed” — rather than a common culture, history, or ethnic identity — whose superiority to the public is not only self-evident but which also can and should be universally applied.

Those unique qualities of US nationalism, according to Pei, make Americans uniquely insensitive to the nationalisms of other countries, and also imbues it with both a “missionary spirit and a short collective memory” — a combination that can be particularly irritating to other countries when Washington asserts itself aggressively on the world scene, particularly in pursuit of its own interests.

“American nationalism is based on universal values, but when it pursues narrow national interests, it looks hypocritical,” said Pei, who noted that anti-Americanism is in large part generated by people who admire American values.

“It is the inconsistency (between values and actual performance) that is driving anti-Americanism abroad,” he said, adding that this was demonstrated by the Pew survey, which showed that those “people who are quite anti-American identify with American values. How we view ourselves is different from how we project ourselves,” according to Pei.

Fukuyama agreed with most of that analysis, but added another element to the uniqueness of US nationalism: the notion that the creed at the core of US identity has historically taken “on some of the attributes of a religion”, in part because of the absence of a state religion, as well as a “legacy of sectarian factionalism” among Protestant groups here.

The result is that US nationalism has a strong moralistic flavour that not only tends to cast foreign policy issues in terms of good and evil and confuses US national interest with the universal good, but also, as Pei argued, invites charges of hypocrisy when Washington’s policy fails to adhere to its basic values.

“The question is whether this kind of hypocrisy isn’t absolutely necessary given (Washington’s) current role in the global system,” Fukuyama asked. “It certainly is irritating to people,” he added. On the other hand, its “messianic universalism” is what keeps the United States engaged in the world, and without it, Washington would be more likely to retreat into its traditional isolationism, according to Fukuyama.

In addition to US hypocrisy, Pei said the Pew survey showed rising fear, especially in predominantly Muslim countries, that US power could be directed against them. “Fear is a primary driver of resentment,” he said.

Some analysts said they were pleased that Washington now evokes fear, particularly in the Muslim world. “World leadership is not about popularity,” Danielle Pletka, a neo-conservative analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told Newhouse News Service. “The right thing is not always the popular thing.”

“I think there’s new-found respect for American power,” said Max Boot, a neo-conservative commentator at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I’d rather be respected than look weak and helpless as we did on Se Sept 12” when most of the rest of the world rallied to Washington’s side. —Dawn/InterPress News Service.