No doubt when the Bush administration leaves office, and should a Democratic one replace it, our approval ratings will rise with our present detractors. But they may also decline among our friends who will learn that U.S. open markets, free trade, and reliable military support in times of crisis are now objects of left-wing criticism. Note in this regard that world opinion toward both China and Russia is turning unfavorable. That distrust will only increase as both begin to flex their muscles — the former gobbling up oil contracts from the most murderous regimes, the latter selling the same rogues anything they need to foment unrest.
A number of British diplomats have expressed weariness over the old special relationship with America. Likewise, the British public now barely expresses a favorable impression of the United States (51 percent). But given the emerging world landscape, such a change in attitude would be suicidal for the United Kingdom. History would instead counsel the British people that Europe has nearly destroyed them twice in the twentieth century, while America sought to save them — and would again in the twentieth-first.
Britain should tread carefully, since it is even more likely that a growing number of Americans is turned off by Europe, British anti-Americanism, NATO, and the Middle East. And in the long history of this country, isolationism, not intervention, has been the more natural American sentiment.
If the British think their Tony Blair was George Bush’s poodle, they may soon see a British prime minister reduced to a Chinese, Iranian, or Russian hamster — as we already have witnessed with the Russian assassination scandal and the even more embarrassing Iranian hijacking of a British boat.
Unfortunately, Russia and China will only grow wealthier from oil and trade surpluses, while the chances improve of a petrol-rich dictatorship in the Middle East gaining nuclear weapons within missile range of Europe. What will keep the U.S. engaged as a powerful ally of a Britain and Europe in their coming hour of need will not be brilliant statesmen or Atlantic-minded Presidents, but only American public opinion and goodwill that are predicated on some notion of reciprocal friendship.
In that regard, such polls continue to be mostly one-sided. What we need now are new comprehensive surveys of what Americans themselves think of the United Nations, the Islamic world, and Western Europe — so that they can try to square the results with our present foreign policy of aid, friendship, or military assistance to those who apparently don’t want or appreciate what they receive.
Why they hate, and like, us.
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