Sympathy for U.S. fades under Bush's leadership

Sunday, September 14, 2003 - 3:30:24 AM PST
Sympathy for U.S. fades under Bush's leadership
Worldwide opinions have moved from
By Richard Bernstein, New York Times

BERLIN -- In the two years since Sept. 11, 2001, the view of the United States as a victim of terrorism that deserved the world's sympathy and support, has given way to a widespread vision of America as an imperial power that has defied world opinion through unjustified and unilateral use of military force.

"A lot of people had sympathy for Americans around the time of 9-11, but that's changed," said Cathy Hearn, 31, a flight attendant from South Africa, expressing a view commonly heard in many countries. "They act like the big guy riding roughshod over everyone else."

In a series of interviews with people across the globe, from Africa to Europe, South America to Southeast Asia, one point emerged clearly: The war in Iraq has had a major impact on public opinion, which has moved generally from post-Sept. 11 sympathy to post-Iraq antipathy, or at least to disappointment over what is seen as the sole superpower's inclination to act pre-emptively, without either persuasive reasons or U.N. approval.

Oil supplies

To some degree, the resentment is centered on the person of President Bush, who is seen by many of those interviewed, at best, as an ineffective spokesman for U.S. interests and, at worst, as a gunslinging cowboy knocking over international treaties and bent on controlling the world's oil supplies, if not the entire world.

Foreign policy experts point to slowly developing fissures, born at the end of the Cold War, that exploded into view in the debate leading up to the war on Iraq.

"I think the turnaround was last summer, when American policy moved ever more decisively towards war against Iraq," said Josef Joffe, co-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. "That's what triggered the counteralliance of France and Germany and the enormous wave of hatred against the United States."

The subject of America in the world is of course complicated, and the nation's battered international image could improve quickly in response to events. The Bush administration's recent turn to the United Nations for help in postwar Iraq may represent such an event.

Even at this low point, millions of people still see the United States as a beacon and support its policies, including the war in Iraq, and would, given the chance, be happy to become Americans themselves.

Some regions, especially Europe, are split in their view of America's role: The governments and, to a lesser extent, the public in former Soviet-bloc countries are much more favorably disposed to U.S. power than the governments and the public in Western Europe, notably France and Germany.

In Japan, a strong U.S. ally that feels insecure in the face of a hostile, nuclear-armed North Korea, there may be doubts about the wisdom of the U.S. war on Iraq. But there seem to be far fewer doubts about the importance of U.S. power generally to global stability.

In China, while many ordinary people express doubts about the war in Iraq, anti-American feeling has diminished since Sept. 11, 2001, and there seems to be greater understanding and less instinctive criticism of the United States by government officials and intellectuals. The Chinese leadership has largely embraced America's "war on terror."

Fashionable view

Still, a widespread and fashionable view is that the United States is a classically imperialist power bent on controlling global oil supplies and on military domination.

This mood has been expressed in different ways by many different people, from the hockey fans in Montreal who boo the U.S. national anthem to the high school students in Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as exchange students because America is not "in." Even among young people, it is not difficult to hear strong denunciations of U.S. policy and sharp questioning of U.S. motives.

"America has taken power over the world," said Dmitri Ostalsky, 25, a literary critic and writer in Moscow. "It's a wonderful country, but it seized power. It's ruling the world. America's attempts to rebuild all the world in the image of liberalism and capitalism are fraught with the same dangers as the Nazis taking over the world."

A Frenchman, Jean-Charles Pogram, 45, a computer technician, said: "Everyone agrees on the principles of democracy and freedom, but the problem is that we don't agree with the means to achieve those ends. The United States can't see beyond the axiom that force can solve everything, but Europe, because of two world wars, knows the price of blood."

Crucial to global opinion has been the failure of the Bush administration to persuade large segments of the public of its justification for going to war in Iraq.

In striking contrast to opinion in the United States, where polls show a majority believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida terrorists, the rest of the world remains skeptical.

This explains the enormous difference in international opinion toward U.S. military action in Afghanistan in the months after Sept. 11, which seemed to have tacit approval as legitimate self-defense, and toward U.S. military action in Iraq, which is seen as the arbitrary act of an overbearing power.

Perhaps the strongest effect on public opinion has been in Arab and Muslim countries.

Even in relatively moderate Muslim countries like Indonesia and Turkey, or countries with large Muslim populations, like Nigeria, both polls and interviews show sharp drops in approval of the United States over the past year.

In unabashedly pro-U.S. countries like Poland, perhaps the staunchest U.S. ally on Iraq after Britain, polls show 60 percent of the public oppose the Polish government's decision to send 2,500 troops to Iraq under overall U.S. command.

For many people, the issue is not so much the United States as it is the Bush administration, and what is seen as its arrogance. In this view, a different set of policies and a different set of public statements from Washington could have resulted in a different set of attitudes.

"The point I would make is that with the best will in the world, President Bush is a very poor salesman for the United States, and I say that as someone who has no animus against him or the United States," said Philip Gawaith, a financial communications consultant in London. "Whether it's al-Qaida or Afghanistan, people have just felt that he's a silly man, and therefore they are not obliged to think any harder about his position."

But while the public statements of the Bush Administration have not played well in much of the world, many analysts see deeper causes for the rift that has opened.

In their view, the Iraq war has not so much caused a new divergence as it has highlighted and widened one that existed at least since the end of the Cold War. Put bluntly, Europe needs America less now that it feels less threatened.

Indeed, while the United States probably feels more threatened now than in 1989, when the Cold War ended, Europe is broadly unconvinced of any imminent threat. As a result, America and Europe tend to view the world differently.

"There were deep structural forces before 9-11 that were pushing us apart," said John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics." "In the absence of the Soviet threat or of an equivalent threat, there was no way that ties between us and Europe wouldn't be loosened.

"So, when the Bush administration came to power, the question was whether it would make things better or worse, and I'd argue that it made them worse."

'A lot of damage'

"In the Cold War you could argue that American unilateralism had no cost," Mearsheimer continued. "But as we're finding out with regard to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, we need the Europeans and we need institutions like the U.N. The fact is that the United States can't run the world by itself, and the problem is, we've done a lot of damage in our relations with allies, and people are not terribly enthusiastic about helping us now."

Still, broad sympathy for the United States exists in many areas. Students from around the world clamor to be educated in America. The United States as a land of opportunity remains magnetic.

Some analysts point out that the German Marshall Fund study actually showed a great deal of common ground between Europeans and Americans.

"Americans and Europeans still basically like each other, although such warmth has slipped in the wake of the Iraq war," Ronald Asmus, Philip P. Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, analysts from the United States, the Netherlands and Italy, respectively, wrote in an article explaining the findings. "Americans and Europeans do not live on different planets when it comes to viewing the threats around them."

But there is little doubt that the planets have moved apart. Gone are the days, two years ago, when 200,000 Germans marched in Berlin to show solidarity with their U.S. allies, or when Le Monde, the most prestigious French newspaper, could publish a large headline, "We Are All Americans."

More recently, Jean Daniel, the editor of the weekly Nouvel Observateur, published an editorial entitled, "We Are Not All Americans."

For governments in Eastern Europe, Sept. 11 has forced a kind of test of loyalties. Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Poland have felt themselves caught between the United States and the European Union, which they will soon be joining.

Here, too, the war in Iraq seems to have been the defining event, the division of Europe into "new" and "old" halves, defined by their willingness to support the U.S.-led war.

Most Eastern European countries side with the European Union majority on such questions as the International Criminal Court, which is opposed by the Bush administration, while helping in various ways with the Iraq war. Poland and Romania have sent troops and Hungary has permitted training of Iraqis at a military base there.

But even if the overall mood in the former Soviet Bloc remains largely pro-U.S., recent polls have shown some slippage in feelings of admiration.

"We would love to see America as a self-limiting superpower," Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish defense minister, said.

Perhaps the administration's decision to turn to the United Nations to seek a mandate for an international force in Iraq reflects a new readiness to exercise such restraint. The administration appears to have learned that using its power in isolation can get very expensive very quickly.

But the road to recovering global support is likely to be a long one for a country whose very power -- political, economic, cultural, military -- makes it a natural target of criticism and envy.

Even in Japan, where support for America remains strong, the view of the United States as a bully has entered the popular culture. A recent cartoon showed a character looking like Bush and wearing a Stars and Stripes vest who is pushing Japanese fishermen away from a favorite spot, saying, "I can fish better."