Hugh Brogan: Why America the giant will always make enemies

People have always found reasons to hate and fear the United States. But a new and virulent hostility is the most dangerous yet

No one should be blamed for an extravagant immediate reaction to the events of 11 September. But as the days and weeks go by, an anti-American strand is developing in the debate about an apposite response which itself misses the point. It is easy to blame the victim.

Traditional anti-Americanists, in Britain at any rate, have always been a minority but to a historian, or indeed to anyone who has lived through the years since the Second World War, they are wearisomely familiar. It seems necessary to explain, in the present context, why they are mistaken. It is also worth making the point that a new sort of anti-Americanism is burgeoning, equally wrong-headed but very different and more consequential.

During the 1950s someone – I think it was my father – remarked that Joe McCarthy was the first individual American ever to be feared or hated in the world at large. Until 1945 the United States was seen as it still wishes to appear – as the great refuge, the land of freedom and prosperity, of promise and opportunity for the little people; an example and a beacon to all nations struggling against colonialism. Even Ho Chi Minh hoped for American support when he first raised his flag of rebellion.

This reputation was not altogether deserved: America had colonies in the Philippines, Panama and Puerto Rico, and had shut the golden door with the anti-immigration laws of the early 1920s. It was in many respects a brutally racist society; but when do image and reality ever exactly coincide? The disjunction between them was far worse in the instance of the Soviet Union. On the whole the United States had earned its popularity abroad. It retains much of it to this day.

But nowadays, we are repeatedly told that America is widely hated. In the face of the mass executions meted out in New York and Washington that can hardly be denied, and it is important to ask why, if only so as to be able to handle the consequences.

Originally, anti-Americanism was the offspring of the Cold War. The victors of 1945 fell out and both sides to the quarrel did all they could to weaken and discredit each other. Much of the left in the West was worm-eaten by Soviet propaganda and, by their excesses, the anti-communist right in America inflamed anti-Americanism. Disputes over Cold War issues were engaged more vigorously in the United States than anywhere else – and mattered more. Their echoes reached Europe and seemed heaven-sent to nations which, whether governed by the left or right, resented their countries' decline of influence compared to the giant in the West.

The fact that he was anything but a selfish giant made matters no better: in Hampstead and on the Boulevard Saint-Germain his benevolence was resented as a humiliation. Characteristically, the British left sneered at Harry Truman as a failed haberdasher, snobbery being as ever our country's darling vice, while the French scorned American materialism. Who would want those new-fangled, imported tractors and refrigerators? The answer was: French peasants and French housewives. Over all these squabbles loomed the shadow of the bomb. Under that dreadful threat it was very difficult to think straight.

The climax came with the Cuban missile crisis. Reaction to that emergency was curiously similar to today's agitation. Grosvenor Square filled with demonstrators denouncing American militarism. Bertrand Russell and the New Statesman vociferated. Panic and prejudice caused these outbursts, which bore little relation to the facts of the crisis; and they had little or no effect on the standing of America and its leader. Certain parallels leap to mind.

The war in Vietnam brought a real change. As before, the greatest hostility to the US government was expressed in the US itself, and certain fundamental failings in American policy were laid bare for all to see. Chief of these, perhaps, was Washington's inability to see international relations except in terms of East-West rivalry: "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" syndrome. But eventually this crisis too passed, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the world, for a moment, seemed a much safer place. Communism evaporated, and old-style anti-Americanism no longer had a footing or a patron.

But the mere exertion of American power, the impact of American wealth (especially when diffused in the purchase of Middle Eastern oil) and of globalisation has brought about a completely new set of problems. Modern civilisation, as symbolised and driven by the United States, has fundamentally destabilised almost all traditional societies. I might add that a similar impact was felt in the modernisation that destabilised Europe and America in the 19th century. Revolutionary resentment has spread through the continents. Radical Islam is but one of its manifestations; and the resumption of mass migration after the hiatus of the mid-20th century means that the revolutionaries do not stay at home – they nurse their grievances in Europe and North America too.

They do not, and will not, see that while the West has no doubt all too often exacerbated its countries' problems, it did not create and cannot solve them. Renewal can only come from the peoples themselves. But the difficulties are so colossal that it is much easier to abandon the struggle and surrender to the delights of abusing the West. And so a new, inchoate anti-Americanism has emerged, devoid of a single focus, but all the more strongly felt. The destruction of the World Trade Centre is its symbol.

What, if anything, can the United States do about it? Like Pearl Harbor, 11 September was a wake-up call. But as the Bush administration has evidently discovered, consequent action can only be cautious and limited. The symptoms can be suppressed – Osama bin Laden and his organisation may yet be eliminated – but the causes will remain. Israel may at last be brought to heel, policy towards Iraq could be revised, but the underlying passions and dislocations will still be there.

If policymakers turn to history for help, they will only discover an old choice and an old solution. Pearl Harbor killed traditional American isolationism for good. It did not need the latest atrocity to teach the US that "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none'' – Jefferson's phrase – was no longer an adequate policy. Since 6 December 1941 the oceans no longer guaranteed American's physical safety.

But isolationism itself was only ever a response, a means to satisfy American nationalism. The instinct to seek a completely free hand in foreign affairs goes back to the very birth of the Republic, when at Paris in 1783 Benjamin Franklin and John Adams double-crossed the French in order to make a separate peace with Britain. This instinct – we call it unilateralism today – repeatedly showed itself in the 20th century. It explains why the US did nothing to avert the coming of the First World War; why it rejected the Treaty of Versailles; why it so frequently showed itself an overbearing ally to Britain during the Second World War; and why since 1995 the Republicans in Congress have so assiduously tried to undermine all treaties, institutions and international practices tending to restrict the operations of the United States.

Just as before, the Americans have discovered that unilateralism flies in the face of reality. The Bush administration is now assiduously building alliances and coalitions; Congress agrees to pay its dues to the United Nations; Pakistan is pardoned for becoming a nuclear power, Russia for its merciless war against the Chechens. Once more, as in the days of Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D Eisenhower, the United States is undertaking to lead the world rather than to ignore it. It is a phase as regularly recurring as its unilateralism.

And it is rather more likely to be successful in the conditions of the 21st century, in which nations are ever more entangled and the power of the US, though still enormous, is becoming relatively less overwhelming. The giant will have to discover the limits of his own strength.

Hugh Brogan is professor of history at the University of Essex and author of 'The Penguin History of the United States'