Through Our Friends' Eyes -- Defending and Advising the Hyperpower

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.

By Bernard-Henri Lévy. Translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America.

By Josef Joffe.

Although the administration of George W. Bush seems to have moderated both the substance and the style of its foreign policy recently, the consequences of its earlier behavior continue to shape international life. Bush's actions during his first term, especially the invasion of Iraq, unleashed waves of anti-Americanism, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. The fallout has greatly complicated the already difficult task of managing U.S. power in a world grown suspicious of U.S. ambitions.

Two new books by Europeans firmly in the anti-anti-American camp shed light on this sorry state of affairs. In American Vertigo, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a leading French public intellectual and latter-day philosophe, attempts to follow in the footsteps (often literally) of Alexis de Tocqueville as he explores whether the United States today is still the democratic, hopeful, and open society of Democracy in America. In Überpower, Josef Joffe, perhaps the most important strategic thinker in Germany today, investigates the rise of anti-Americanism worldwide, ponders its implications for U.S. grand strategy, and prescribes a treatment for Washington's current foreign policy ills.

Much of the critical reaction to American Vertigo so far has revealed that Americans remain morbidly sensitive to slights from respected foreign observers. The same easily wounded amour-propre that inspired legions of American literati and newspaper editorialists to denounce nineteenth-century travel writers such as Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens has blinded many readers to the true nature of Lévy's book. Although blasted as the work of an unenlightened and condescending Euro-snob who fails to grasp the majesty of U.S. democracy, the book is in fact an artfully constructed, unblinking defense of the United States against European (especially French) anti-Americanism, a stance all the more remarkable and courageous in the age of Bush.

Yes, Lévy waxes self-righteous about his noble and sensitive opposition to the death penalty. Yes, Lévy finds the mixture of Americans' puritanical fear of sex and their consumerist obsession with it to be creepy and disconcerting. Yes, Lévy descants on his opposition to the war in Iraq and condemns what he considers to be the excesses of neoconservatism in U.S. foreign policy. But it is easy to see where his deepest sympathies lie.

Lévy argues, rightly, that the United States has lost neither its republican instincts nor its democratic soul. Debate and dissent still flourish there. Civil society remains independent and suspicious of the state. There are a lot of fundamentalists running around, but they have not turned the country into the dystopia of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Nor has nationalism vanquished democracy, although the United States today, as in Tocqueville's time, is vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority. And despite his disagreements with right-wing intellectuals such as William Kristol, Lévy admires their attempts to engage with the world of ideas. Indeed, it is within the American left that he finds an obsession with money and a near-total absence of ideas.

THE UGLY ANTI-AMERICANS

Ironically, Lévy's tribute to the unchangingly democratic nature of the United States makes one of Tocqueville's concerns more salient. Tocqueville believed that international affairs was the Achilles' heel of U.S. democracy. He thought that a successful foreign policy required qualities that democratic societies generally lack, and that those qualities democracies generally have are worse than useless when it comes to confronting the dangers of the real world.

Joffe draws attention to this problem in a very precise and pointed way in Überpower. Joffe recognizes that a successful U.S. foreign policy would need to be thoughtful, subtle, and sophisticated -- but he also realizes that it is questionable whether U.S. public opinion would be able to sustain such a policy. He argues that anti-Americanism constitutes a major and growing problem for U.S. foreign policy and, perhaps even more serious, that powers such as China, Russia, and the European Union are beginning to unite against the United States. An Atlanticist and anti-anti-American to the core, Joffe feels that these developments are troubling not only for the United States but for the international community as a whole. There is important work to be done in the world, he argues, and only the United States can do it.

Joffe maintains that systemic anti-Americanism is akin to a belief that the United States is in "a permanent state of crime against mankind," in the words of the twentieth-century French novelist Henri de Montherlant. Joffe identifies five classic marks of anti-Americanism: reducing Americans to stereotypes, believing the United States to have an irremediably evil nature, ascribing to the U.S. establishment a vast conspiratorial power aimed at utterly dominating the globe, holding the United States responsible for all the evils in the world, and seeking to limit the influence of the United States by destroying it or by cutting oneself and one's society off from its polluting products and practices. Joffe cites a number of extremely disturbing documents, cartoons, and statements from the Arab world demonstrating a full-fledged ideologically based form of anti-Americanism that displays all five traits. A less virulent form of the disease has infected Europe, Joffe argues, and he is able to bring forward an uncomfortable amount of evidence to support his point.