In the past, anti-Americans saved their bile for two separate areas of U.S. misconduct. They were appalled, first, by America’s antics abroad. They were disgusted, second, by the way Americans behaved inside their own country. Intellectuals would inveigh against a society apparently riddled with crime, riven by race and obsessed with money. Now, thanks to globalization, the two older forms of hostility have converged: America’s external and internal conduct have become one and the same thing. Now it’s not nuclear warheads or the CIA that anti-Americans fear, but what the United States does to itself. For, in today’s world, that affects people far beyond America’s shores.
If America cultivates genetically modified foods, then green activists in Australia will be justifiably concerned: the risk to the environment is disrespectful of borders. And if Americans’ cultural habits change, then so do ours: what “they” watch in Kansas is what “we” watch in Kazakhstan. The old anti-Americanism, which had foreigners sneering at the Yanks, must give way to a subtler form of dissent. The rest of the world now has a legitimate stake in faulting the way Americans live their own lives. For in the new century, what happens in the United States happens to all of us.
