How the world sees Americans

It's complicated, though. Take our decision to attack Afghanistan. It seems that even people who ended up supporting it initially railed against it because of our rhetoric, the more superficial ways that we portrayed our right to attack the Taliban. Does it always come down to policy? Is there a way we could portray ourselves better?

Definitely. Recently, I was telling a journalist that we don't realize how strongly most of the world opposes an attack on Iraq. And this journalist said, "Yes, but that's what they said before the last Gulf War and they ended up all being happy that we went. And that's what they said before Afghanistan and then they cheered us for going." But that's the echo chamber of Washington. There's a difference between us cajoling other countries into agreeing with what we're doing and what's happening with Iraq at the U.N. They basically realized that they can't stop us. So we tell ourselves that we have approval when we bully them into it. That will rebound to our disadvantage if this war isn't as fast, furious and final as Mr. Bush says.

People are much more sophisticated about that overseas, especially when you're talking about war. They've lived war; in almost every other place in the world, war is not an abstraction the way it still is here in the U.S., even after Sept. 11.

I wanted to go back to our rhetoric. When Bush after Sept. 11 said, "You're with us or you're with the terrorists," what kind of effect did that have on people outside of America? Even though I understand what's incredibly arrogant and alienating about that statement, it's so American in its bravado that it wasn't entirely surprising to me. But I would imagine that it was jarring to non-Americans.

He gave that remark in a speech 10 days after the terror attacks. In retrospect you can recognize it as the beginning of the erosion of international solidarity with us.

Because there really was an incredible outpouring of support for us immediately after the attacks?

Enormous. I witnessed it with my own eyes in Europe. Enormous solidarity. And then 10 days later Bush comes out and says that. That's where it started to go south. The next day in Le Monde, that remark was three times on the front page: in the headline, in the subhead and in the lead of the article. Then you turn to the Herald Tribune and it's not even to be found on the front page. It's buried in the 20th graph on the jump page of the article. That shows you just how different the mind-set was, that the Europeans and other outsiders hear that blusteriness and unilateralism immediately. For the most part, they held their tongues about it but it sure pushed those buttons. You could see them thinking, Oh God, it's still the same old Americans.

Then fast-forward to four months later and Bush gives his infamous "axis of evil" speech, and that's the end of the solidarity. Der Standaard, one of the big papers in Belgium, remarked on how rapidly that sense of solidarity disappeared because of the Bush government's attitude of you're either with us or against us.

By the way, it was so popular the first time I guess that Bush decided to bring it back! In this year's speech to the U.N. on Sept. 12, Bush said that the U.N. had to make a choice -- either you back American plans for preemptive attack on Iraq or you are "irrelevant." What does that say? That the rest of the world gets a vote if it agrees with the United States. If it doesn't agree with the United States, you have no vote. Now, what would we think if German chancellor Schröeder said that about currency evaluation or trade rules?

We'd think he was channeling Hitler.

When our president says that, our media and for the most part our political elite don't even recognize what kind of a message that sends to the rest of the world, much less how that is going to hurt us in our foreign policy.

I don't support the war against Iraq, but at the same time I believe the terror threat is real. I think that hatred of America is very rare around the world but is very intense among the people who harbor it. They are clearly people who are intent on prosecuting this war, and we have to deal with that threat seriously. But one of the reasons that I oppose the Iraq war is that it will actually make things much, much worse for us. What we need in this war are friends overseas. We cannot possibly win the war on terror without our friends doing any number of things -- from helping on intelligence to getting the populaces of these nations to turn in people who are dangerous. Instead of having good relations with our neighbors, we're turning our friends away, we're alienating the people that we need with our arrogance, with our unilateralism.

You say at one point that Sept. 11 rendered superpowers obsolete. In many ways we still have this idea of ourselves as a world superpower, but that idea stems from a Cold War mentality. Why has terrorism rendered the superpower obsolete and what does that mean?

I do think that that concept of superpower is really a 20th-century concept and that in the new 21st century the nature of the threat is so different that you cannot simply dictate solutions anymore. I don't think that those rules apply anymore now. In theory, the United States could say to everyone else, "We're going to nuke you if you don't do what we like." In practice, that's not going to happen. The nature of the threats now are much more diffuse, and by their nature they are unsusceptible to solutions by one country.

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