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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Feb. 27, 2007 / 9 Adar, 5767

Provoking dislike throughout the world is part of being an empire

By Niall Ferguson


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Being hated is no fun. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been asked, "Why do they hate us?" — and another for each of the different answers I've heard. It's because of our foreign policy. It's because of their extremism. It's because of our arrogance. It's because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hate not knowing why they're hated.


The best explanation is the simplest. Being hated is what happens to dominant empires. George Orwell knew the feeling. As a young man he served as an assistant police superintendent in British-run Burma, an experience he memorably described in his essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Called upon to kill a pachyderm that had run amok, Orwell was suddenly aware "of the watchful yellow faces behind" him: "The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh."


Eric Blair — as Orwell was known then — could scarcely have been better prepared for his role as a colonial official. Born in Bengal, the son of a colonial civil servant, he had been educated at Eton, where boys learn not to worry about being hated. Yet even he found the resentment of the natives hard to bear: "In the end the sneering … faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves….[It] was perplexing and upsetting."


That's a feeling American soldiers in Baghdad must know pretty well.


But who hates Americans the most? You might assume that it's people in countries that the United States has recently attacked or threatened to attack. Americans themselves are clear about who their principal enemies are. Asked by Gallup to name the "greatest enemy" of the U.S. today, 26% of those recently polled named Iran, 21% named Iraq and 18% named North Korea.


Are those feelings reciprocated? Up to a point. The Gallup Center for Muslim Studies' latest poll found 52% of Iranians view the U.S. unfavorably. But that is down from 63% in 2001. And it's significantly lower than the antipathy felt in Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Two-thirds of Jordanians and Pakistanis have a negative view of the U.S., as do a staggering 79% of Saudis.


These figures suggest a paradox in the Muslim world. It's not the United States' enemies that hate it most. It's people in countries that are supposed to be friendly, if not allies.


The paradox of unfriendly allies is not confined to the Middle East. Last week was not a good week for Americanophiles in Europe. Tony Blair announced British troop withdrawals from Iraq, an unfortunate signal on the eve of the U.S. "surge." In Rome, his counterpart Romano Prodi had to resign because his coalition partners would not agree to keep Italian troops in Afghanistan or to enlarge a U.S. military base in Italy. Anti-Americanism is nothing new in European politics, but there is something new going on here, which extends to traditionally pro-American constituencies.


Back in 1999, 83% of British people surveyed by the U.S. State Department's Office of Research said they had a favorable opinion of the U.S. But by 2006, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, only 56% did. British respondents to the Pew surveys now give higher ratings to Germany (75%) and Japan (69%) than to the U.S. — a remarkable transformation in attitudes, given the notorious British tendency to look back nostalgically and unforgivingly to World War II. Britons recently polled by Pew regard the U.S. presence in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea.


Nor is Britain the only disillusioned ally. Only 38% of Germans and 19% of Canadians believe that U.S. foreign policy considers the interests of others. The poignant fact is that when Americans are asked to rate foreign countries, their most favorable views are of none other than Britain, Germany and Canada.


In the 1990s, Madeleine Albright pompously called the United States "the indispensable nation." Today it seems to have become the indefensible nation, even in the eyes of its supposed friends.


Orwell would have understood. Just as it was the educated beneficiaries of British rule in Asia who were the most strident anti-imperialists in Orwell's day, so the British empire's most natural allies — France and the United States — were anything but Anglophile. For it turns out that power not only corrupts. It also tends to isolate.


There is, after all, a reason why they say it's lonely at the top.

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Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004). Comment by clicking here.


02/21/07: Obama's muddled stance on foreign intervention
02/06/07: Britain's American revolution
01/30/07: Independence isn't always beautiful
01/09/07: The new world order looks terribly familiar
12/16/06: The new world order looks terribly familiar
12/13/06: Baker-Hamilton's fine print: Stay in Iraq
12/05/06: The surrealism of Iraq
11/29/06: Some civil wars never end
11/20/06: Will GOP get last laugh?
10/25/06: America's brittle empire
10/17/06: Failing to stop North Korea from going nuclear may have been the last straw for the onetime guardian of world order
10/03/06: Why Churchill opposed torture
09/27/06: Insanity on a Global Scale
09/19/06: The GOP will hang on
09/13/06: Long Live Royal Bloodlines!
09/05/06: Red-state Republicans and blue-faced liberals are starting to agree: Green is the way
08/29/06: What if the London Bombers Succeeded?
08/15/06: Testing the Limits of the U.N.: Who seriously expects Kofi Annan to stop Al Qaeda terror attacks?
08/08/06: The coming tsunami of trash
07/18/06: Forget the '60s and ‘Make Love, Not War.’ Today's world is facing a Summer of Rage
07/11/06: When will China pull the plug on North Korea?
06/20/06: Hedge funds vs. central bankers: Will inflation, deflation or recession win in the coming months?
06/13/06: Britain's economy is just like America's — minus the entrepreneurs and growth
06/06/06: The X-Men have taken over Washington
05/30/06: Quit protesting, profs!
05/23/06: World markets' wild ride: Economic volatility is back with a vengeance
05/16/06: The Cold Wars are coming
05/09/06: Many commentators are missing dangerous political shift
05/02/06: Put some sugar in your tank
04/25/06: Hu and the dog that didn't bark
04/18/06: Should Americans be less optimistic?
04/11/06: Globalization's second death?
04/04/06: So many ‘special’ friends
03/28/06: Let's get it right about what has gone wrong
03/21/06: Congress is trying to give the world a globotomy
03/14/06: Lame ducks can still bite back
03/07/06: A 19th Century critique of a 21st Century president
02/28/06: The crash of civilizations
02/21/06: Not the president, but close
02/14/06: Want historic trouble? Look south
02/07/06: Greenspan advising Britain? It's housing bubbles, deficits and potential meltdowns all over again
01/31/06: Missing the Cold War
01/24/06: It's a sick, Thick World
01/17/06: Tomorrow's world war today
01/03/06: Scotland, it's over, but keep the accents
12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq
12/20/05: History, democracy and Iraq
11/22/05: Ghost of Napoleon haunts Tony Blair
11/22/05: Can it happen in Britain too?
11/15/05: Red plus blue equals purple
11/10/05: The fires of disintegration
11/01/05: Triumph of an über-wonk

© 2006, Los Angeles Times Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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