• Cold War legacy: U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and covert attempts to overthrow governments in Iran, Guatemala and Cuba, among others, created profound distrust of U.S. motives throughout the developing world. Europeans also disdain these policies and bemoan the cultural coarseness of Americanization sweeping their continent.

Anti-Americanism was something that was fostered as state policy by the Soviet Union over many years. The Soviets are comfortably ensconced in the trash heap of history, despite all attempts to revive them, but that particular legacy lives on. While we were running our side of the Cold War, they were running theirs, and I fear they ran their propaganda machine better than we ran ours. Their educational system wasn't available to us to subvert, even if we could have brought ourselves to do it, which we probably couldn't. And that "cultural coarseness" that Julia's talking about is called "vitality." When Europeans come up with something vital it sweeps this country. That's how we ended up with Abba. Turtlenecks and Gauloises don't cut it when it comes to vitality, though I'm not quite sure why the Chicken Dance never caught on here.

Americans, by contrast, tend to dismiss this side of the Cold War. Gore Vidal famously referred to this country as the United States of Amnesia. We're all about moving forward, getting over it, a nation of immigrants for whom leaving the past behind was a geographic, psychological and often political act. As the last guy standing when the Cold War ended, in 1989, we expected the world to embrace free markets and liberal democracy.

That would have been a rational move on the part of the rest of the world. We don't live in a rational world, though. We live in a world where people, even in this country, want a Fearless Leader™ with all the answers laid out.

• Power and powerlessness: Power generates resentment. But the United States has lost the ability to see its power from the perspective of those with less of it. In Latin America, for example, U.S. policies — whether on trade, aid, democracy, drugs or immigration — presumed that Latin Americans would automatically see U.S. interests as their own. And when denied deference, we sometimes lash out, as did Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when he lumped Germany, a close U.S. ally, with Cuba and Libya because Berlin opposed the Iraq war.

Not precisely. Our bitch wasn't so much the opposition to the war, but the anti-American cheapshots Schroeder's administration took. We weren't happy with Cretien's Canada, either. And we lumped Germany with France, not with Cuba and Libya.

• Globalization: In the 1990s, our government, private sector and opinion makers sold globalization as virtually synonymous with Americanization. President Clinton promised that open markets, open societies and smaller government would be the bridge to the 21st century. So where globalization hasn't delivered, the U.S. is blamed.

I'm not too sure where globalization hasn't delivered. The people most opposed to globalization are those who run regimes where globalization is implemented haltingly, if at all. The countries that are prospering are precisely the ones who have. Pre-globalization India was the place we used to send food for the Starving Chldren™. Now they're sending groceries to the Starvin Children™ in Somalia or someplace.

• What we stand for: Bush is wrong to say that foreigners hate us because of our values and freedoms.

That they hate us for our freedoms is a demonstrably true statement when discussing the shariah and scimitar set. It's demonstrably true when discussing backwaters like Cuba and Sudan and Syria, where iron-fisted dictatorship is the ideal. What're we discussing, Julia? Brazil? Bolivia? Kabila's Congo?

Quite the contrary. U.S. credibility abroad used to be reinforced by the perception that our laws and government programs gave most Americans a fair chance to participate in a middle-class meritocracy. But the appeal of the U.S. model overseas is eroding as the gap between rich and poor widens, public education deteriorates, healthcare costs soar and pensions disappear.

Are you tracing out why? Some things are bad ideas, but once implemented you can't undo them. Health insurance falls into that category. It wasn't until HMOs were introduced, partially in response to increased tort lawyering, that the price of a visit to the doctor started going up each and every year. Public education began deteriorating about the time we established a Department of Education. Pension benefits began disappearing when they became too generous for companies to maintain, especially while unions were dipping into them. But our laws and government programs do give Americans a fair chance to participate in a middle-class meritocracy. The country's not run by old money. The economy's powered more by first and second generation Americans.

Most recently, the U.S. government's seeming indifference to its most vulnerable citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina further undercut belief in the American social contract. The immigration debates also have fostered the perception that the U.S. is vulnerable, hostile and fearful.

Katrina was a unique meeting of an historic storm with a federal government that was prepared for a storm of less than hisotric dimension, a state government that was marked by ineptitude and indecisiveness, and a city government that gave rise to the phrase Stuck on Stupid. Add in hysterical reporting by a hostile press and a natural disaster that was dwarfed by Indonesia's tsunami and Pakistan's earthquake becomes an iconic event. Perception is everything, apparently. We don't seem to spend a lot of time dwelling on the devastation wrought by the same storm on Mississippi and Alabama, do we?