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497 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1988)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0497 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Anti-Americanism is a subject much in the headlines these days in the form of bombings, murders, hijackings, kidnappings, and the entire repertoire of terrorism. No American who travels abroad or meets many foreigners in the United States can remain unaware of a much less visible anti-Americanism that is expressed in ways that do not make the front pages. We feel ourselves to be confronted by a hostile and thankless world and our personal safety is at risk when we travel abroad. Our choices seem to be turning our backs on the rest of the world in neo-isolationism or asserting ourselves against our tormentors to reestablish the respect that used to be ours by right. Neither of these choices is a real one. To take the most obvious example, we cannot disengage ourselves from the Middle East as long as we need its oil and maintain our support of Israel. In 1983, however, an assertion of American power in Lebanon-where we had been able to impose our will in 1958-ended in disaster. Not everything is as easy as Grenada. A HISTORICAL VIEW The nostalgia for the 1950s, like most nostalgia, is of faulty memory. In September 1954, The Annals published a symposium rather like the present one, which began with an editor's introduction that could for the most part be just as well reprinted here.' It speaks of our need for foreigners' admiration, our belief that American national character is a desirable and perhaps exportable commodity in the world market, and our conviction that, if we are rightly understood, the frictions and obstacles in the course of our national policy will disappear. It goes on to observe that the contributions to the volume will delight no American Narcissus, and that what appears is a bewildering variety of pictures, which illustrate the idiosyncrasies of individual viewers rather than the character of the America they are looking at. The present reader will find these same ideas expressed in this introduction and in many of the contributions that follow. Thus even a generation ago, the United States had an image problem and was profoundly worried about that image. For that matter, one could reach back several generations and find dislike and disdain for Americans and their country-as well as find Americans who were disturbed by these attitudes. Foreign observers, beginning at least with Tocqueville, have been struck by Americans' need for appreciation and even adulation from abroad. The passages quoted in the present issue of The Annals by Marie-France Toinet are nearly as valid today, a century after they were written, as they were in Tocqueville's time. Scott Thompson also notes our need for admiration as a historical phenomenon and one that persists especially among the political appointees in the government, who often are good barometers of public opinion. Americans have an endearing conviction that their 1. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 295, America through Foreign Eyes, ed. Richard D. Lambert (Sept. 1954). 9

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