I said it, too

A review of Josef Joffe's Überpower:

The United States is not simply a great power, it is something new under the sun, what the terrified French call a hyperpuissance, or hyperpower, and what Mr. Joffe dubs an überpower.

OOOhh! German! Even better than French!

Power makes the less powerful nervous, whether they are friends or enemies...

It does not matter what the United States does, Mr. Joffe argues. The mere fact that it can act with impunity causes alarm. To Europeans, the new United States looks like Gulliver did to the Lilliputians: a giant whose intentions are uncertain and whom they would prefer to see bound by a thousand little ropes. "Their motto is: let him be strong as long as he is in harness, be it self-chosen or imposed," he writes.

European opposition to the current Iraq war, in this analysis, becomes clearer. France and Germany, joined by Russia and China, joined forces to frustrate American designs, not simply on the merits of the case, but also as a matter of principle or instinct. Success in Iraq would only make the United States more powerful and therefore more unpredictable and threatening: "America's triumph would grant yet more power to the one and only superpower — and this on a stage where it had already reduced France and Russia, the E.U. and the U.N., to bit players," Mr. Joffe writes.

So it's not really about Iraq itself.

Mr. Joffe offers some sound advice here, recalling the skillful American diplomacy of the early postwar years. In the 1940's and 50's, the United States willingly bound itself, and limited its scope for action, by creating international institutions like NATO and the United Nations and by entering into agreements with its allies, some of them friends and some of them former enemies, that made them stakeholders in the new world order.

At the same time, Mr. Joffe, who was educated at Swarthmore College and Harvard, delivers a scathing critique of European anti-Americanism. Disagreement with American policy is one thing, but a significant percentage of Europeans denounce the policy simply because it comes from the United States, source of all the world's miseries. This sentiment, which goes back centuries, was neatly summed up in a single sentence from Le Monde, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which the United States was defined by "cretinism, Puritanism, barbarian arrogance, unbridled capitalism."

Anti-Americanism, Mr. Joffe argues, can sometimes be as complex, paranoid and all-encompassing as anti-Semitism.

Why is anti-Semitism the embodiment of something that is "complex, paranoid and all-encompassing"? It suggests that Anti-Americanism is anti-Semitism.

"...America gets it coming and going," he writes. It is puritanical and self-indulgent, philistine and elitist, ultrareligious and materialist. When it does not intervene, say, in Rwanda, it is wrong. When it does intervene, it is accused of naked imperialism.