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But President Obama is starting to repair the damage.
I like to watch TV shows imported from Britain on the educational channel. Most are light comedy: "Red Dwarf" - a lost spaceship in the distant future, "Last of the Summer Wine" - retired characters in the York countryside. But a few recently have been more current and with a little more edge such as "MI-5" - an action show about the British spy agency.
I was watching a show called "New Tricks" about retired British policemen who solve cold cases. It's usually light and uncontroversial too, especially compared to American cop shows. But last night, the show was all about how the CIA killed nine British citizens and covered it up. The CIA had kidnapped them and intended to take them to Guantanamo when their airplane crashed at an American air base in Britain. Americans were portrayed as people who would lie to you whether they needed to or not.
The British action show "MI-5" regularly features a shadowy villain who works for the CIA and can't be trusted. The plots usually revolve around how Britain is forced to get involved in dirty deals around the world by corrupt British politicians and American money.
The point isn't whether these things actually happen. The point is that they are plausible stories that writers in Britain think represent a point of view that people in Britain will accept.
And that's the tragedy.
Years ago, these plots would have been written about Germans, Russians, or even the French. Now, America is the bad guy. How did we get to be the bad guy?
Thanks to Bush, in most of the world, America's name is now dirt. Bush didn't actually create the root causes. For example, the ground-breaking novel, "The Ugly American" came out in 1958. But he has done more to confirm this image in the minds of the rest of the world than anyone before in our history.
America now has a universal image of cowboy diplomacy and self-centered arrogance. The US was the only major industrial nation that refused to even consider the Kyoto Protocol. Most nations blame us for bringing on the world-consuming financial meltdown.
Pew Research Center testimony before Congress had this to say:
"To give you some sense of the magnitude of the problem, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. declined in Germany, from 78% in 2000 to 37% currently. The numbers are similar in France, but even worse in Spain, where only 23% have a favorable view, and in Turkey, where it is 12%. Most people in these countries held positive views of the U.S. at the start of the decade."
Their testimony also also included these gems:
"80% of the population of Indonesia thought we were a military threat to their country. Our popularily rating dropped from 61% to only 15% in only one year after the Iraq invasion.
"In all five predominantly Muslim countries included in the 2006 study, fewer than one-third had a favorable view of the U.S.
"The British, French, and Spanish publics were all more likely to say the U.S. presence in Iraq poses a great danger to regional stability and world peace than to say this about the current governments of Iran or North Korea.
Thankfully, President Obama is now repairing at least some of the damage. When we stepped aside and insisted that European countries take the lead role in Libya, it changed our image a lot. When President Obama delivered a major foreign policy address in Cairo, Egypt the entire world took notice of the difference. The consensus opinion around the world was that he was awarded the Nobel Prize mainly for being "not Bush".
You might think that American can and should stand tall, proud, and alone in the world. You might be wrong.
