U.S. Foreign Policy Assertive, Divisive

On Sept. 12, Le Monde newspaper printed a headline for the ages: “We are all Americans.”

Such sentiment in France, whose Le Monde-reading elite tends to snipe at American politicians even as it consumes American products, epitomized a global outpouring of sympathy for the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the following months, former foes and staunch allies backed what the United States called the war on terrorism. They generally regarded it as a smart, methodical campaign that did the world a service by toppling Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and dismantling the Al Qaeda terrorist network base there. U.S. pressure combined with the horror of Sept. 11 to spur many countries to confront festering problems of Islamic extremism, border security and transnational crime.

The aftermath brought international transformations such as a remarkable U.S.-Russian partnership. The realpolitik of the war on terrorism created instant winners (Israel), forlorn losers (Latin America) and unlikely allies (Pakistan).

But in many ways and in many places, the attacks did not change the world. The post-Sept. 11 period of solidarity appears to have dissipated, a mere pause in a steady rise of disillusionment with the world’s only remaining superpower, according to interviews conducted by Times correspondents around the world.

With a few important exceptions, foreign leaders and voters say the U.S. may have missed a historic opportunity to forge a broad international coalition and revamp its increasingly negative image.

“There was an all-time high splash of pro-American sentiment after Sept. 11,” said Yuri A. Levada, director of VTSIOM, one of Russia’s main polling groups. “But we soon saw that America didn’t know what to do with all the support it was getting from all over the world, including Russia.”

Today, critics accuse the U.S. of aggressive unilateralism. Rightly or wrongly, they regard the Bush administration--with the notable exception of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell--as a caricature of arrogance. They cite President Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, the legal limbo of the prisoners in U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, American opposition to an international criminal court and environmental treaty, and, most prominently, the current war of words on Iraq.

If the U.S. marches alone against Iraq, it might find itself with fewer friends than in a long time, according to the interviews.

“The U.S. thinks it can fight any country that disobeys its rule,” said Wu Wei, 35, a Chinese journalist. “But the truth is that no country can rule the world.... If the U.S. doesn’t modify its current policies, more Americans will be sacrificed for the wrongheaded policies of the U.S. government.”

As always, the America-bashing must be examined carefully and in context. It seems almost ritualistic to blow off steam with rhetoric while quietly cooperating with and benefiting from U.S. policies.

Anti-Americanism is a familiar and tricky phenomenon, according to Chris Brown, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. Brown said Europeans react superficially to issues such as the saber-rattling on Iraq, failing to recognize that the debate in Washington is more sophisticated than critics would acknowledge.

“There is an ambiguous view of America in the world anyway,” Brown said. “Everybody criticizes it, but the people who criticize it most virulently are the same ones who want to go and work there.”

The United States still enjoys the allegiance of allies from Britain to Japan, Italy to Australia. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi declared with characteristic effusiveness last year: “I love America. I am on whatever side America is on, even before I know what it is.”

Probably more than any nation, Israel remains a staunch friend of America. Israelis also see themselves fighting a war on terrorism, even if Palestinians and some Israeli dissenters say the analogy is flawed. Israeli support grew during the last year as the Bush administration sided overwhelmingly with Israel in the conflict with the Palestinian Authority and all but abandoned Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

In fact, Israel may be unique in that it actually encourages an invasion of Iraq--”the sooner the better,” as government officials put it. The conservative Jerusalem Post recently proclaimed that Bush’s hard line on Iraq puts him “at the cusp of greatness.”

On Sept. 11, unexpected solidarity came from a formidable former enemy. The first world leader to call Bush with condolences was Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. The phone call set up a sea change in the relationship. Amid consternation and grief, the world almost took for granted the unexpected transformation in U.S. relations with Russia.

Putin embraced the war on terrorism. His acceptance of U.S. troops on former Soviet soil in Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia was an enormous geopolitical shift. It marked the end of Russia’s domination of a region that it has considered its backyard since the days of the “Great Game,” when the Russian and British empires competed there for influence two centuries ago.

Meanwhile, pro-American sentiment among Russians shot up, according to polls: 74% of the population was positive, and only 10% was sharply anti-American. By February, however, Russian goodwill had sunk to 48%, and it continues to fluctuate.

Hard-line conservatives in the Russian security forces and bureaucracy are alarmed by the U.S. presence in Central Asia and want to reverse Putin’s policy.

“The old establishment ... is full of old, conservative thinking,” said Liliya F. Shevtsova, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, noting that ordinary Russians are more sympathetic. “The people have turned out to be more reasonable than the elite.”

In contrast, the attitude on the “Arab street” remains resolutely cold. It is usually difficult to generalize about the Arab world because of its diversity, but when it comes to America, there seems to be near universal agreement.

Distrust of America is pervasive, particularly in a nation such as Jordan, where more than half the population is ethnically Palestinian. Many Arabs simply don’t believe that Osama bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead, they believe that Israel carried out the attacks to undermine the Palestinian uprising, and they view America’s war on terrorism as part of a broad Zionist conspiracy.

In Jordan and Egypt, two of the United States’ closest allies in the region, there is a general sense that Washington squandered any sympathy dividend. Though many Arabs were upset by the number of civilian casualties in the attacks, there is a widespread belief that the U.S. had it coming and that a chastened America would evaluate its Middle East policy.

“The U.S. has exploited 9/11 for its own agendas,” said Maha Mohammed, 26, a student counselor at an American school in Cairo. “Fighting terrorism has become this license to do anything.”

Many Arabs also believe that Israel now acts with impunity. Throughout the Arab world, people still repeat as fact the rumor that thousands of Jews didn’t show up for work at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Ironically, the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign has enlisted unlikely allies: some of Israel’s worst enemies. Although Syria remains on the State Department’s list of terrorism sponsors, Syrian security forces have helped capture and interrogate Al Qaeda suspects. Pakistan’s regime is another unexpected ally struggling against the nation’s own widespread anti-Americanism and potent fundamentalist groups.

It may be more disconcerting to hear anti-American vitriol from nominal friends such as the South Koreans. Although the South Korean government has unequivocally committed itself to aiding the U.S. against terrorism, it is common to hear the “man on the street” praise Bin Laden and say America has itself to blame.

“I’m so happy,” a high school student from Kwangju, South Korea, wrote to Bush about the terrorist attacks for an English class assignment. “Because of that accident that broke out, Americans say, ‘Ha. Ha. Ha. We are heroes. We love peace.’ In fact, it’s [a] lie. They love war and power and money.”

South Korean anti-Americanism intensified after Bush included North Korea in his axis-of-evil speech, offending South Koreans who believe that present-day North Korea is more to be pitied than condemned.

Closer to home, Latin Americans fear that they have all but dropped off the maps in Washington. The reformist government of Mexican President Vicente Fox had especially high hopes dashed; when Bush took office, he made Mexico a priority.

Days before the terrorist attacks, Fox visited Bush and made great strides toward an accord that would make Mexican immigration to the United States safer and more orderly. Fox asked Washington to grant legal status to some of the millions of undocumented Mexicans who work in the United States and preferential visa status to aspiring immigrants.

Fox’s vision of a more open border understandably fell victim to national security imperatives after Sept. 11. In a speech in New York to the Council of Americas in May, he said the lack of progress on the Mexican agenda in Washington was preventing Mexico from taking a more powerful role in crises in Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina.

“In these difficult times,” Fox said, “Latin America seems to have been abandoned to its fate.”

European governments worry that the U.S. will isolate itself by ignoring them. Perhaps nowhere is America’s lost moral capital more obvious than in Germany, a nation lifted by U.S. generosity from the vanquished devastation after World War II to become a global economic power and a democratic paragon.

U.S. citizens, from the lowest-ranking GI to the visionary statesmen of the Cold War era, have been widely revered in Germany. But even some of Washington’s oldest admirers are now shaking their heads over the aggressive drumbeat against Iraq and U.S. refusals to abide by international judicial, trade and environmental agreements.

German politicians have indulged in U.S.-bashing during a closely fought election season. The U.S. economy is depicted by all candidates as an example of corporate greed prevailing over an enslaved and insecure work force. When German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wants to discredit his pro-business opponent, Bavarian Gov. Edmund Stoiber, he accuses him of seeking to impose “American labor standards” on Germans.

“U.S. managers line their pockets while the workers placed in their trust are being laid off,” Schroeder told an election rally in Berlin late last month. In Germany, he said, “no one is forced to be the slave of another.”

And in France, the traditional tension between resentment and admiration of the United States manifested itself in dueling books dedicated to Sept. 11. First came “The Horrifying Fraud” [L’Effroyable Imposture] by Thierry Meyssan, which spins the conspiracy theory that the terrorist attacks were actually the work of a fiendish U.S. military-industrial cabal intent on a clandestine takeover of power. Although Meyssan has been dismissed as a crackpot, the book topped best-seller lists in France for weeks.

In response, two French journalists went to Washington to debunk Meyssan’s theories, including his claim that the plotters faked the plane attack on the Pentagon and used a guided missile instead. They published a book called “The Horrifying Lie.”

Despite the debate, complaints and worries, the aftermath of Sept. 11 pushed European politics decidedly to the right during the last year. European governments, and many others, recognize the stark realities produced by unmatched U.S. military might, whether they like it or not.

“The European emotional response to what happened Sept. 11 is obviously fading away, which is, I would say, natural because time goes on,” said former Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz, an expert at the Center for International Relations in Warsaw. “What is really at stake is the nature of the European-U.S. relationship.

“To put it in a slightly different fashion, will the U.S. need Europe? Europe will need the United States. But whether it will be reciprocal is a big question.”

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Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City; Henry Chu in Beijing; Barbara Demick in Seoul; Robyn Dixon in Moscow; David Holley in Rome; Tyler Marshall in Hong Kong; Richard C. Paddock in Jakarta, Indonesia; Valerie Reitman in Tokyo; Michael Slackman in Cairo; Hector Tobar in Buenos Aires; Carol J. Williams in Berlin; and Tracy Wilkinson and Mark Magnier in Jerusalem. Also contributing were Times researchers Rafael Aguirre in Mexico City, Maria De Cristofaro in Rome, Ela Kasprzycka in Warsaw, Vanessa Petit in Buenos Aires, Janet Stobart in London, Sari Sudarsono in Jakarta and Jailan Zayan in Cairo.