Josh Marshal points out one of the consequences of the arrogant unilateralism of the Bush administration:

"Schroeder in Germany, Lula in Brazil, now Roh's victory in S. Korea…latest 'wake-up call' to U.S., but not clear what's being heard." So read the headline summary little more than a week ago in the Nelson Report, the news and gossip sheet of choice for DC's Asia policy hands and trade policy mavens. (Yes, such a thing actually exists and it's an extremely entertaining and informative read.) In his inimitable style, Chris Nelson was pointing to an increasingly clear trend which has yet to garner much notice in the mainstream press: the growing number of elections around the globe in which the winning candidates ran on some variant of anti-Americanism.

The more the Bushies piss of the rest of the world with their America-can-do-no-wrong approach, the more the rest of the world will move away from us and into the hands of those who would advocate the equally extreme position that America-can-do-no-right. Call this the new dominoe theory. Except, in this case, it is America that is pushing them over. Like your typical spoiled child, the Bushies seem to have no concept of the rule that every action produces a reaction, often in the opposite direction to what you wanted in the first place.

The standard answer to this on the pacifist left would be to say that clearly we're doing something wrong if everybody's getting so pissed at us. On the right, you'd have another knee-jerk response about blame-America-First, appeasement and various and sundry other yadas. But clearly there should be some thoughtful middle-ground. It's one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids. I can't give you the precise lunch money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice-President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I'm getting at. This isn't about blaming America first. It's about making sure America is as smart as she can be in her own interests, about managing the realities of the unipolar world system in ways that most benefit our long-term interests rather than simply doing what we can force through in the near-term. What we're learning is that there's a price you pay for telling everyone else in the world they can #$%& themselves and trying to govern the globe by sporadic applications of blunt force.

It is always amazing to me how hard it is for people to get that simple concept through their heads.