by Ben Winsor

Created on: April 11, 2008

There has been a marked global increase in anti-American sentiment since 2001 and there is no shortage of people offering their explanations as to why. In the New York Times on September 14 2001, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California Ronald Steel Proclaimed: "They hate us because we champion a 'new world order' of capitalism, individualism, secularism and democracy".

His sentiments where echoed by the President who declared that those who attacked America "hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other". However such reasoning is not sufficient to explain anti-American sentiment in the West where such values are common.

Otto Reich, a former Bush administration ambassador to Venezuela, offers an alternative explanation: "The United States is the scapegoat. It provides an easy excuse for the failures: if something isn't working, blame the Americans. Scratch the surface of some of these anti-Americans and you find self-loathing."

Such explanations are comforting and convenient because they shift the problem and require no inward appraisal. However the actual causes of most anti-American sentiment are wide and varied, though predominantly due to the nation's own actions and policies. Harvard Graduate and Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Duke University, Tim Booth: "The phenomenon to which we refer as "anti-Americanism" is multi-faceted and maybe it's really a set of distinct phenomena".

Brendon O'Connor and Martin Griffiths describe this further in The Rise of Anti-Americanism: "Anti-Americanism is not a comprehensive or coherent belief system or ideology, but rather a series of criticisms and prejudices that have haphazardly been labelled [sic] anti-Americanism."

Political radicals such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Harold Pinter are often described as anti-American' because they are seen to oppose not only US policies and administrations, but the country's very system of government. These intellectuals are noted for their harsh criticism of United States' foreign and domestic policies dating back before the first Bush Administration. They point to the US's hypocritical support for dictators - such as Saddam Hussein and the Saudi Arabian Monarchy - and their attempts to undermine democratically elected governments such as in Chile during the 70s and currently in Palestine. They label the U.S. as a rouge terrorist'

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