European Anti-Americanism in The Age Of Obama

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “reboot America’s image around the world” and this is one promise Obama has attempted to fulfill as president. Yet despite Obama’s persistent and sometimes craven attempts to curry favor abroad, the U.S. remains a target of the European MSM and, after a brief honeymoon period, the president himself is starting to draw criticism.

This piece by Soeren Kern in the Brussels Journal provides a simulataneously depressing and amusing cross-section of the criticism. It’s essentially the same garbage that held sway in Europe during the Bush administration — America the torturer, America the persecutor of gays and lesbians, America the obese (here they have a point, but Europe also has a major obesity problem), America the home of extremist violence and hate crimes, etc.

Kern concludes his piece with this quote from the center-right of Times of London in an article called “Eventually, We Will All Hate Obama Too”:

Barack Obama, en fête around the world, will one day learn that there is no magical cure for the envy of others. What makes America the indispensable power (and even more indispensable in the era of the new China), is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable.

Indeed.

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