Review: Friendly Fire, Überpower, America against the World

Abstract

FRIENDLY FIRE Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century Julia Sweig New York: Public Affairs, 2006. xvii, 25ipp, US$25.00 cloth.UBERPOWER The Imperial Temptation of America Josef Joffe New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 271pp, US$24.95 cloth.AMERICA AGAINST THE WORLD How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006. xix, 259pp, US$25.00 cloth.Walter McDougall began his magisterial 1997 study of US foreign policy, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since /776, by quoting some lines from Randy Newman's satirical song, Political Science, in which the singer highlights the unerring ability of allies to, as McDougall puts it, get our goat with their criticism of Washington's policies. For sure, there is nothing new about the tendency of American allies (either their leaders or their publics, or both) to criticize particular aspects of US foreign and domestic policies. Regularly during the Cold War, Washington seemed to be at odds with many of its friends and allies, so much so that one US defence secretary during the late 19705 was heard to query, apropos the receipt of news that the alliance had fallen into disarray, When has NATO ever been in array?As we know, these intra-alliance tensions, however grave they may have appeared at the time, proved ultimately to be less than fatal from the point of view of America's (and, it must be said, its allies') overriding interest during the Cold War, namely the containment of the Soviet Union and the safeguarding of transatlantic security. The Soviets were held in check until they finally collapsed; and the western Europeans never did experience either a Soviet invasion or, nearly as bad, a relapse into the kind of internecine, interstate bloodletting that had so frequently been their lot ever since the dawn of the Westphalian order in the mid-i7th century.Today, it has become an article of widespread conviction that opposition globally to what America does and even what it stands for has swelled to unprecedented proportions, with the obvious implication being that, unless abated, the current and rising tide of will be bound to have sinister implications for the United States, as well as, presumably, for the entire west. This time it seems to be much more a question of America's getting its allies' goats than of the reverse, for many now insist that it is the emanating from within the west, rather than from outside it, that will prove to be the most consequential as the Cold War recedes from collective memory. In their own way, the three books under review here offer a perspective on what might be termed-to adopt the imagery suggested by the first of our authors, Julia Sweig-friendly fire anti-Americanism (sometimes referred to as lite to distinguish it from the sort of throat-slitting, head-lopping antiAmericanism associated with America's jihadist enemies). But the softness of the modifier to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Sweig's book nor the other two minimize the potential consequences that could ensue, more for Washington than for its traditional allies, should there be no respite from the current miasma attending America's image abroad.As might be expected from someone who is the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Sweig allocates a significant portion of her book to Latin America (Mexico excepted), which she sees as a kind of seedbed for much of today's anti-Americanism. Indeed, she leaves the reader with the impression that had the US been able to develop a more Latinofriendly foreign policy, it would have gone a great distance along the road to remedying the legitimacy crisis from which it is now said to be suffering in international affairs. In this respect, she challenges two of the major contemporary arguments surrounding friendly-fire anti-Americanism, namely that it is primarily a European phenomenon, and that is has at least as much-perhaps more-to do with what America /5 than with what America does. …