Why do they hate us? If "they" means the rest of the world, the short answer is: They don't. Not all of them. Not even most of them.
Not yet, anyway.
The bewildered, hurt-feelings question that became a cliche after the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, was as misleading as any sweeping generalization. In fact, the United States remains remarkably popular in most of the world -- though the Bush administration, with its go-it-alone approach to world problems, seems to be undermining that popularity.
In December, when the Pew Research Center published an extensive survey of world opinion, its interpreters focused on the slippage in U.S. popularity over the last two years. The poll of 38,000 people in 44 countries found growing resentment for this nation's unilateral pursuit of its goals, from junking treaties to marching toward war in Iraq.
But the emphasis on declining ratings obscured the durability of U.S. popularity. Favorable views of the United States remained remarkably high in Western Europe (from 61 percent of those polled in Germany to 75 percent in Great Britain, despite the bitter anti-American commentary of many intellectuals after Sept. 11); Eastern Europe (61 percent in Russia to 80 percent in Ukraine); and nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, where only Muslim Bangladesh, at 45 percent favorable, dipped below a majority.
At the moment, American unpopularity remains largely focused in the Muslim world: Only 6 percent of Egyptians, whose government receives more U.S. aid than any in the world except Israel, had a favorable view of the United States; 10 percent of Pakistanis; 25 percent of Jordanians; 30 percent of Turks.
Such data are crucial background for anyone approaching the shelf-full of new books that examine America's place in the world.
Both Why Do People Hate America?, by two British writers, Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies (The Disinformation Company, 240 pages, $12.95), and especially The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, by the San Francisco journalist Mark Hertsgaard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pages, $23), make some nods to the virtues of the United States. But they spend far more words illuminating the reasons so many foreign observers are contemptuous of us as a power and as a people.
The books will be bitter medicine for most Americans; we prefer to hear how grand and good we and our country are, and our presidents routinely accommodate us. Both books, moreover, are seriously flawed. Hertsgaard extrapolates from brief encounters with cab drivers and waiters and often lapses into platitudes. Sardar and Davies spend too much space analyzing American TV shows and make some silly errors. (Thomas Friedman does not write for the Chicago Tribune; the United States does not maintain a stockpile of biological weapons, etc.)
Nonetheless, both books are useful challenges to the common American assumption that foreigners who dislike us are ill-informed, envious or "evil." They show how the United States, in a word that has caught on in Europe, is now not just a superpower but a hyperpower -- a nation whose military, economic and cultural dominance is unprecedented in human history. And none of the runners-up -- imperial Rome or Britain, for instance -- were thrust daily in the faces of the rest of the world by television, movies and music.
Americans, roughly 4 percent of the world's people, consume over half of all its goods and services. The $10 billion we spend annually on pet food is $2 billion more than what the United Nations estimates is required to give everyone in the world an adequate diet. The three richest Americans have assets exceeding the combined gross domestic product of the 48 poorest countries.
We see ourselves as generous to a fault. But that is only one symptom of what Hertsgaard rightly calls American "obliviousness." In fact, we rank dead last among the 22 most-developed countries in the percent of GDP we spend on foreign aid: just one-tenth of 1 percent -- with well-off Israel our single largest beneficiary. In order to sell even this meager philanthropy to Congress and American taxpayers, the U.S. Agency for International Development requires that most aid purchases be made from U.S. suppliers.
Both books decry the parochialism and trivialization of the U.S. media. Controlled by fewer and fewer corporations, the media do a poor job of reporting on other countries, they assert, cutting expensive foreign correspondents and going for the easy profits of sleazy "reality" shows.
The orthodox leftist analysis of Hertsgaard and Sardar and Davies will close the minds of many conservative readers. But two other books offer a less doctrinaire analysis that even fervent devotees of George W. Bush may find persuasive.
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone, by Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Oxford University Press, 222 pages, $26), shrewdly analyzes the way the information revolution is shifting power away from states toward individuals -- whether pop culture superstars or charismatic terrorist leaders.
An assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, Nye is no pacifist. But he warns that the fate of the war on terrorism will be determined less by America's overwhelming military power than by the "soft power" of culture, information and image. The Bush administration would be wise to read carefully his case that collaborating with allies in facing the world's dangers is almost always preferable to standing alone.
Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (Doubleday, 256 pages, $26) is a riveting and original book that challenges key tenets of American political faith.
A Yale law professor, Chua draws her thesis from her family's experience as members of the Philippines' Chinese minority, whose huge economic power draws the violent hatred of the impoverished majority Filipinos. She shows how such "market-dominant minorities" exist in much of the world -- from the Lebanese in West Africa to the Indians in East Africa and even the Jews in Russia, where six of the seven top "oligarchs" in the late 1990s were Jewish.
By urging unregulated capitalism, Chua writes, the United States helps increase the economic dominance of such minorities. But the U.S. also pushes for free elections, which put political power in the hands of the disenfranchised majority. In many countries, from Rwanda to former Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe, the resulting collision has caused unrest and even genocide.
Chua's central insight is that while America does not have a market-dominant minority, "Americans today are everywhere perceived as the world's market-dominant minority, wielding outrageously disproportionate economic power relative to our size and numbers. As a result, we have become the object of mass, popular resentment of the same kind that is directed at so many other market-dominant minorities around the world." Sept. 11 was one murderous expression of that anger.
Chua suggests anti-American terrorism is unlikely to be deterred by flag-waving, bomber-flying belligerence. (Anyone notice the jingoistic display preceding the Super Bowl?) Instead, she counsels "generosity and humility" both to America and to market-dominant minorities around the world.
After so insightful a diagnosis, Chua's vague prescription comes as a letdown. But to appreciate the wisdom of her counsel, consider what advice you might give to Indonesia's Chinese minority -- 3 percent of the population controlling 70 percent of the economy in 1998, when pent-up anger burst forth in a three-day spree of arson, looting, rape and murder targeting the Chinese.
In the wake of the rioting -- a Sept. 11 of sorts for the Indonesian elite -- would you have advised the Chinese to flaunt their wealth and power? To label the rioters as "evil" and reject any discussion of their motives? If so, what would the likely outcome be?
Asking "why they hate us" may be simplistic. But asking questions -- exercising that truly American freedom -- is more productive than retreating into Pavlovian patriotism. In carefully seeking answers from the world beyond our borders, Americans may break out of our obliviousness and find our way to a less terrorized future.
Scott Shane, a reporter for The Sun since 1983, has written extensively about terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. He was The Sun's correspondent in Moscow from 1988 to 1991. He is the author of Dismantling Utopia, an account of the collapse of Soviet communism.