Why Do They Hate Us?

Twenty-one years ago, I was sitting in a cantina in a small town in central Brazil eating spaghetti with a friend of mine.

An old, grizzled-looking fellow sitting at the next table over heard that I was from New York, and he went into this long, loud tirade about America.

It seemed that at some time previous to my walk into that cantina, America had slapped tariffs and duties on the international beef market, and driven this Brazilian fellow (and hundreds of other fellows just like him) out of business. Did I — a teenaged American kid — know the first thing about the international beef market and America's influence on it? Of course not. Did everyone else in the town I was in know about it? Oh, you betcha.

It was the singlemost valuable thing I learned during that visit to Brazil: Things that America does in the world — things that don't even make the deepest-set page of the New York Times — have a huge effect someplace; an effect that, were it to happen to your or me, would have us writing our Congressmen, calling the news channels, organizing protest marches, and — unlike these Brazilian townsfolk — when election day rolled around, making sure we got our revenge at the voting booth.

That day in Brazil, I just happened to be sitting in one of those someplaces America had effected, and found out first hand what a single stroke of a Washington bureaucrat's pen on the 615th page of some obscure trade agreement can do to some people's opinion of America.

As Mohsin Hamid writes here in this excellent piece of commentary about American influence:

"[T]here is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans.

They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences.

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian."

It's something to keep in mind: America meddles, plain and simple. It meddles with good intentions, or it meddles with selfish intentions, or it meddles because the meddling it did before has backfired. America meddles.

I'm not going to be so shortsighted as to say that America should quit meddling altogether... but while I still haven't learned a damn thing about the international beef market (and whether the tariffs America imposed back in 1985 were actually a life-saving Godsend, or the tool of satan himself) I can say for certain that there is a village full of Brazilians who haven't thought very highly of America ever since... and I'm quite sure that there are thousands of other someplaces all over the world where people feel the same way.