Anti-Americanism: Myth or Reality?

Americanism and the American World Order. By Giacamo Chiozza. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 235 pp., $60.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-89206-6), $25.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-89208-0). When President Obama took office in January 2009, one of his top foreign policy priorities was to counter the high levels of anti-Americanism in global public opinion that, in his view, isolated the United States and threatened its national security. Obama's emphasis on soft power, public diplomacy, and multilateral engagement helped stem this tide (British Broadcasting Company 2010). Still, mass publics in many countries remain wary of the US government and its foreign policies long after the Bush Doctrine, Abu Ghraib, and other legacies of the previous administration. The protracted spike in anti-Americanism, while worrying policy makers, has also drawn the attention of scholars who have explored the roots (Kohut and Stokes 2006; Rubin and Rubin 2004) and variation (Katzenstein and Keohane 2007; Singh 2006) of these attitudes. In Anti-Americanism and the American Order , Giacomo Chiozza enhances this scholarly literature by firming up the empirical foundations of this phenomenon. Specifically, Chiozza disaggregates the closely followed Pew Global Attitude Surveys of 2002 and 2004 and identifies the underlying determinants of individual attitudes across dozens of industrialized and developing countries. While his study reveals multiple, overlapping grievances regarding US policies, it …