Quotes in Defence of America

Anti-Americanism is an all purpose remedy or response to a wide range of grievances and frustrations (to be distinguished from rational and specific critiques of U.S. policies, needless to say).

Many people around the world crave modernity but once it becomes clear that some of its fruits or by products are problematic, they turn on the U.S. -- the major representative of modernity.

People also love American mass culture and despise it (intellectuals in particular, not the same people who consume it voraciously).

Some people blame the U.S. for throwing around its weight (globally) others for not doing enough good around the world. Everybody wants to have higher standards of living but many fail to recognize that this requires higher degrees of industrialization and productivity which impinge on the environment, plus capitalism which has proved far more productive than the varieties of socialism attempted.

The major contradiction is that millions of people want and try to come to this much vilified country from every corner of the world. At the same time few of the most embittered domestic critics would consider moving abroad to get away from all this evil, as they see it. (Gore Vidal is an exception, having denounced the U.S. from Italy, through much of his life).

Prof. Paul Hollander


If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States. And they will do so in whole sentences of good American slang.

-Fouad Ajami


Americans are regularly reproached for wanting to "impose their economic and social model" on others. But whenever there is an economic slowdown, other countries anxiously await an American-led "recovery."

-Jean-Francois Revel



Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain once observed, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true of America’s role in the world.

-Michael Mandelbaum


For skeptics of democratic capitalism, the United States is, quite simply, the enemy. For many years, and still today, a principal function of anti-Americanism has been to discredit the nation that stands as the supreme alternative to socialism. More recently, Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others have taken to pillorying the U.S. for the same reason. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist society is a way of proclaiming: Look what happens when modern democratic capitalism is implemented!

The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto the monster scapegoat, the United States of America.

The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by Europes inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act.


Americans might ask themselves what interest the United States could have in plunging into the bloody quagmire of the Balkans, that centuries-old masterpiece of Europe's matchless ingenuity. But Europe found herself incapable of bringing order by herself to this murderous chaos of her own making. So it devolved upon the United States to take charge of operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The Europeans thanked the Americans afterwards by calling them imperialists--although they quake with fright and accuse the Americans of being cowardly isolationists the moment they make the slightest mention of bringing their soldiers home.

Jean-Francois Revel