A Titanic Task

If the next president does have that courage, and he or she makes the right choices, we will find that anti-Americanism doesn't have to be this bad. It is possible to be the lone superpower and be accepted, or at least tolerated. I remember traveling with Bill Clinton to Aachen, Germany, in June 2000, when the Europeans awarded him their prestigious Charlemagne Prize for leadership. This—after a decade of bad blood with Europe over Bosnia and other issues. And remember, few countries begrudged us the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. Indeed there is not a government anywhere in the world that wasn't hoping we'd clean that last refuge of Al Qaeda out, and fix the place up. Imagine what the payoff in prestige might have been had Bush brought into the international community a pariah country that had defeated two previous imperial powers—Britain and Russia—in the last two centuries! Instead we made up a new war. And then we botched it.

There is yet light in this bleak landscape. America built up a large fund of goodwill over the decades. It is not entirely depleted. Other nations are too weak or distrusted to lead the international system (think China, which has never had the political reckoning with its mandarins; or Russia, which seems to be building its rep on greed and assassination). The Chicago survey also shows that many nations around the world could be put in a forgiving mood with the right American leadership. Says Ikenberry: "The U.S. can restore its position, but the next administration is going to need to make a pretty clean break with Bush foreign policy. I wish I heard the '08 candidates really saying this!" Steven Kull, the editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org, agrees. "If the United States were to give clear signals that it was getting back with the program this rupture [in world opinion] could heal rather quickly," he says.

Our destiny as Thomas Jefferson's "Empire for Liberty" is still within reach. We remain the only nation that governs itself, if imperfectly, by the same universal principles that most of the rest of the world wants to embrace. "Other countries want to be able to like us. We need to move back toward the love-hate relationship we've always had, rather than the pure hate relationship," says Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. "We may be the world's worst possible global leader but we're better than all the others." If both the American public, and the rest of the world can find a way to believe that again, then the healing can begin.

© 2007