The U.S. is like this giant ant farm. The problem is, these people seem to hate ants

The notion of Obama as the physician who could lance the wound of anti-Americanism in the world began to gain traction during the election cycle, and now with his victory it is really in motion.

Let me be blunt: I think this idea wrong-headed, and possibly even dangerous, in the way that all things that raise hopes to unrealistic levels can be dangerous.

I got my first taste of real anti-Americanism when I moved to Rome, shortly after graduating college. It was a strange time both for myself and my country; the U.S. had recently invaded Iraq, and I — in the parlance of our times — didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground.

It was useful for me to experience anti-Americanism in its unadulterated form. Up to that point, I had only witnessed what I assumed was the real thing, but was in fact the pissant variety, from certain of my left-leaning undergraduate peers. It wasn’t, of course, because you can never truly hate something that makes you what you are — the fact that they didn’t realize how American they really were being merely a product of their inability to step outside of themselves.

The real thing, of which I found myself on the receiving end from an admirable cross-section of western Europe, is both more visceral and more all-encompassing. It may begin with a discussion about policy, but quickly spirals out to include culture (we have none), crime and racism (we’re chock full of it), aesthetics (man, are we obese), cuisine (because of that godawful food we eat), and so on.

The typical opening is what I came to think of as the “Pinochet,” in which I’m called upon to explain all manner of iniquities perpetrated by my government over the past 200-some odd years (so-called because Pinochet always figures prominently — which I find weird: just off the top of my head I can think of like a dozen worse things we’ve done than support Augusto Pinochet). And, by “called upon to explain,” I mean called upon to apologize profusely for. Such incidents were inevitably cathartic experiences for my interlocutors, rather than conversations in any traditional sense of the word.

Granted, when I first arrived, in the late summer of 2003, anti-American sentiment had reached a fever pitch. The war was on everybody’s mind. And I should be clear about this: the first George W. Bush administration employed doubtless the worst public diplomacy in U.S. history. If a Martian had to glean an understanding of Earth’s geopolitics from the public statements of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, he would never imagine that they were speaking of putative allies, or that America and western Europe had millennia of shared history and culture behind them.

But the range and intensity of anti-Americanism in the world did not spring fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, upon Bush taking office. Recall that it was under the sainted Clinton that the term “hyperpower” was coined for America by then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine.

The problems of anti-Americanism are structural in nature. They result from the fact that we are the world’s largest power, that we continue to project our military force and our popular culture to the farthest corners of the earth.

Certainly, a more diplomatic administration would be an improvement. “Speak softly and carry a big stick” goes a long way, further at least than the past eight years. But as long as Obama holds the maximalist view of our interests that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War — and statements like this suggest nothing to the contrary — and as long as we remain atop the global pecking order, things are unlikely to change much past this initial honeymoon period. The sooner we grasp this fact, the easier it will be for all involved.

BTW, the title to this post is from the wonderful Barcelona, which makes a similar point but does so with much greater wit. Go see it if you haven’t already.