Fukuyama's thesis, advanced in the early 1990s, seemed consistent with the remarkable events going on in the world. The collapse of the Soviet Union left America as the world's sole superpower, with unrivaled military superiority. The discrediting of socialism meant that there was no conceivable alternative to capitalism, and all the countries of the world seemed destined to be integrated into a single global economy. Dictatorships crumbled in many parts the world, especially in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and were replaced by democratic regimes. America launched the silicon revolution, and continues to dominate the world in technology. And American ideas and American culture have captured the imagination of young people around the world, and made deep inroads into previously remote outposts in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. 

These are undeniable and hugely important facts, but the complacent confidence of the Planet America thesis has been shattered. The Cold War is over, and yet the world has become a more dangerous place. Americans, never particularly attentive to the rest of the world, have become acutely aware that there are powerful currents of resistance to globalization and Americanization. There are lots of people who do not want to become like us, and many people, especially in the Muslim world, apparently hate our guts and want to wipe us off the face of the earth. This realization, for Americans, comes as a surprise. 

In his 1997 book The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington warned that America and the West should not arrogantly assume that the rest of the world would uncritically embrace the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization. Huntington disputed the thesis of "the end of history" and pointed out that the great victories won in recent years by liberalism and democracy were mainly in Latin America and Eastern Europe, regions of the world that were within the traditional orbit of the Judeo-Christian West. Huntington argued that in the post-cold-war world, the most dangerous conflicts would occur "across the fault lines between the world's major civilizations."(13) Huntington identified civilizations mainly in terms of religion: Hindu civilization, Confucian civilization, Islamic civilization. Given the deep differences between these religious tribes, Huntington predicted that they were bound to quarrel. 

So who is right, Fukuyama or Huntington? This is one of the questions that this book will try to answer. But first let us examine the three main currents of opposition to the global spread of American influence. 

First, the European school. Actually this may be more precisely described as the French school, although it has sympathizers in other European countries. The French seem to be outraged by the idea that any single nation, let alone the United States, should enjoy complete global domination. The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, termed the United States a "hyperpower" and scorned its "arrogance." The French are not against arrogance per se, but in the case of the United States they regard the arrogance as completely unjustified. For the French, the grotesque symbol of Americanization is McDonalds, and many French citizens cheered in 1999 when a sheep farmer named Jose Bove trashed a McDonald's in France. The French worry that the spread of English threatens the future of the French language and, even more precious, French culture. Their anti-Americanization is based on a strong belief in French cultural superiority combined with a fear that their great culture is being dissolved in the global marketplace. 

Most Americans find it hard to take the French critique seriously, coming as it does from men who carry handbags. French anti-Americanism is also a political device to legitimate the use of tariffs, thus protecting French products that cannot compete in the global marketplace. But at the same time the French have a point when they object to the obliteration of local cultures and the homogenization of the planet in the name of globalization and Americanization. Probably we can also agree that the world would be a worse place without the French language and French cuisine, although whether we can do without French films and French intellectuals remains open to dispute. 

A second and more troubling critique of America comes from what may be termed the Asian school. This view, which has advocates in Singapore and Malaysia and, most important, China, holds that America and the West have solved the economic problem but they have not solved the cultural problem. As Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, has argued, America has generated a lot of material prosperity, but that has been accompanied by social and moral decline. Champions of the Asian school hold that they have figured out a way to combine material well-being with social order. In Singapore, for example, you are encouraged to engage in commerce, but there is no chewing gum in public and if you paint graffiti on cars, as one American visitor did, you will be publicly caned. The result, advocates of the Asian school say, is that people can enjoy a high standard of living but without the crime, illegitimacy, and vulgarity that are believed to debase life in the West. 

The "Asian values" paradigm is often viewed as an excuse for dictatorship. Admittedly it serves the interest of Asian despots to portray democracy as a debauched system of government, so that they can justify keeping political power in their own hands. But it is hard to deny that there are powerful elements of truth in the way that Lee Kuan Yew and others portray America and the West. That there may be an alternative model better suited to the human desire for prosperity, safety, and public decency cannot be rejected out of hand. Lee Kuan Yew's slogan for this is "modernization without Westernization."(14)

Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and ferocious attack on America comes from what may be termed the Islamic school. From what Americans hear of this group, with its slogans that we are the Great Satan, land of the infidels, and so on, it does not seem that this is a very sophisticated critique of Western society. On television we see protesters in Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, and they seem like a bunch of jobless fanatics. But behind these demonstrators who chant and burn American flags in the street, there is a considered argument against America that should not be lightly dismissed. Americans should not assume that because they haven't heard much of this argument, it does not exist or has no intellectual merit. 

On the surface it seems that the Islamic critique is mainly focused on American foreign policy. Certainly many Muslims angrily object to the degree of U.S. political and financial support for Israel. "We consider America and Israel to be one country," one Palestinian man told CNN. "When the Israelis burn our homes and kill our children, we know that it is your weapons, your money and your helicopters that are making this happen." Interestingly the Palestinian problem was not initially a big concern for Bin Laden; he seemed more exercised about the effect of American sanctions on the Iraqi people, and about the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the "holy soil of Islam." Another issue for Bin Laden, which resonates especially with Muslim intellectuals, is the proclaimed hypocrisy of America. In this view, the United States piously invokes principles of democracy and human rights while supporting undemocratic regimes, such as that of Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, that do not hesitate to trample on human rights. Probably Bin Laden strikes the biggest chord with the man in the Arab street when he blames the poverty and degradation of the Islamic world on Western and specifically American oppression. 

Clearly the foreign policy element is important, but there is much more to the Islamic critique than that. Once we begin to peruse the newspapers and listen to the public discussion in the Muslim world, and once we read the thinkers who are shaping the mind of Islamic fundamentalism, we realize that here is an intelligent and even profound assault on the very basis of America and the West. Indeed the Islamic critique, at its best, shows a deep understanding of America's fundamental principles --- which is more than one can say about the American understanding of Islamic principles. This critique deserves careful attention not only because of its intrinsic power but also because it is the guiding force behind the jihad factories --- the countless mosques and religious schools throughout the Muslim world that are teaching such violent hatred of America. 

Islamic critics recognize that other people around the world are trying to selectively import aspects of America and the West while rejecting other aspects that they do not like. Thus the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, and the Latin Americans all want some of what the West has to offer --- especially technology and prosperity --- but they want to keep out other things. "Modernization without Westernization" expresses a widespread desire to preserve the treasured elements of one's own culture and identity in the face of Westernization. 

But the Islamic thinkers argue that this is an illusion. In their view modernity is Western, and they regard the notion that one can import what one likes from America while keeping out what one dislikes as a terrible illusion. The Islamic argument is that the West is based on principles that are radically different from those of traditional societies. In this view America is a subversive idea that, if admitted into a society, will produce tremendous and uncontrollable social upheaval. It will eliminate the religious basis for society, it will undermine traditional hierarchies, it will displace cherished values, and it will produce a society unrecognizably different from the one it destroyed. As Bin Laden himself put it, Islam is facing the greatest threat to its survival since the days of the prophet Muhammad. 

He's right. And the Islamic thinkers who fear the dissolution of their traditional societies are also correct. America is a subversive idea, indeed it represents a new way to be human, and in this book we will explore what this means and whether this subversive idea is worthy of our love and allegiance. 

So what is the Islamic objection to America? In conversations with Muslims from around the world, several common themes emerge. "To you we are a bunch of Ay-rabs, camel jockeys and sand-niggers." "The only thing that we have that you care about is oil." "Americans have two things on their mind: money and sex." "Your women are whores." "In America mothers prefer to work than to take care of their children." "In our culture the parents take care of the children, and later the children take care of the parents. In America the children abandon their parents." "America used to be a Christian country. Now atheism is the official religion of the West." "Your TV shows are disgusting. You are corrupting the morals of our young people." "We don't object to how you Americans live, but now you are spreading your way of life throughout the universe." "American culture is a kind of syphilis or disease that is destroying the Islamic community. We won't let you do to us what you did to the American Indian people."

What stands out about the Islamic critique is its refreshing clarity. The Islamic thinkers cannot be counted in the ranks of the politically correct. Painful though it is to admit, they aren't entirely wrong about America either. They say that many Americans see them as a bunch of uncivilized towel-heads, and this is probably true. They charge that America is a society obsessed with material gain, and who will deny that this is an accurate perception? They condemn the West as an atheist civilization, and while they may be wrong about the extent of religious belief and practice, they are right that in the West religion has little sway over the public arena, and the West seems to have generated more unbelief than any other civilization in world history. They are disgusted by our culture, and we have to acknowledge that there is a good deal in American culture that is disgusting to normal sensibilities. They say our women are whores, and in a sense they are right. Even their epithet for the United States --- the Great Satan --- is appropriate when we reflect that Satan is not a conqueror; he is a tempter. The Islamic militants fear that the idea of America is taking over their young people, breaking down allegiances to parents and religion and traditional community; this concern on their part is also justified. 

The most important and influential of the Islamic critics of the West is the philosopher Sayyid Qutb.(15) Born in Egypt in 1906, Qutb became disenchanted with Arab nationalism as a weapon against Western imperialism. He became a leader and theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization that is also one of the oldest institutions of radical Islam. Qutb argued that the worst form of colonialism --- one that outlasted the formal end of European colonialism --- was "intellectual and spiritual colonialism." What the Islamic world must do is to destroy the influence of the West within itself, to eradicate its residue "within our feelings." 

What, for Qutb, was so evil about the West? Qutb argues that from its earliest days Western civilization separated the realm of God from the realm of society. Long before the American doctrine of separation of church and state, the institutions of religion and those of government operated in separate realms and commanded separate allegiances. Consequently, Qutb argues, the realm of God and the realm of society were bound to come into conflict. And this is precisely what has happened in the West. If Athens can be taken to represent reason and science and culture, and Jerusalem can be taken to represent God and religion, then Athens has been in a constant struggle with Jerusalem. Perhaps at one point the tension could be regarded as fruitful, Qutb writes, but now the war is over and the terrible truth is that Athens has won. Reason and science have annihilated religion. True, many people continue to profess a belief in God and go to church, but religion has ceased to have any shaping influence in society. It does not direct government or law or scientific research or culture. In short, a once --- religious civilization has now been reduced to what Qutb terms jahiliyya --- the condition of social chaos, moral diversity, sexual promiscuity, polytheism, unbelief, and idolatry that was said to characterize the Arab tribes before the advent of Islam. 

Qutb's alternative to this way of life is Islam, which is much more than just a religion. Islam is not merely a set of beliefs; rather, it is a way of life based upon the divine government of the universe. The very term "Islam" means "submission" to the authority of Allah. This worldview requires that religious, economic, political and civil society be based on the Koran, the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, and on the sharia or Islamic law. Islam doesn't just regulate religious belief and practice; it covers such topics as the administration of the state, the conduct of war, the making of treaties, the laws governing divorce and inheritance, as well as property rights and contracts. In short, Islam provides the whole framework for Muslim life, and in this sense it is impossible to "practice" Islam within a secular framework. 

This is especially so when, as Qutb insists, the institutions of the West are antithetical to Islam. The West is a society based on freedom whereas Islam is a society based on virtue. Moreover, in Qutb's view Western institutions are fundamentally atheist: they are based on a clear rejection of divine authority. When democrats say that sovereignty and political authority are ultimately derived from the people, this means that the people --- not God --- are the rulers. So democracy is a form of idol-worship. Similarly capitalism is based on the premise that the market, not God, makes final decisions of worth. Capitalism too is a form of idolatry or market-worship. Qutb contends that since the West and Islam are based on radically different principles, there is no way that Islamic society can compromise or meet the West half way. Either the West will prevail or Islam will prevail. What is needed, Qutb concludes, is for true-believing Muslims to recognize this and stand up for Islam against the Western infidel and those apostate Muslims who have sold out to the West for money and power. And once the critique is accepted by Muslims the solution presents itself almost automatically. Kill the apostates. Kill the infidels. 

Some Americans will find these views frightening and abhorrent, and a few people might even object to giving them so much space and taking them seriously. But I think that they must be taken seriously. Certainly they are taken seriously in the Muslim world. Moreover, Qutb is raising issues of the deepest importance: Is reason or revelation a more reliable source of truth? Does legitimate political authority come from God or from man? Which is the highest political value: freedom or virtue? These issues are central to what the West and America are all about. Qutb's critique reveals most lucidly the argument between Islam and the West at its deepest level. For this reason, it should be welcomed by thoughtful people in America and the West. 

The foreign critique of America would not be so formidable if Americans were united in resisting and responding to it. Patriotism, then, would be an easy matter of "us" versus "them." But in truth there are large and influential sectors of American life that agree with many of the denunciations that come from abroad. Both on the political left and the right, there are people who express a strong hostility to the idea of America and the American way of life. In many quarters in the United States, we find a deep ambivalence about exporting the American system to the rest of the world. Not only do these critiques make patriotism problematic, but they also pose the question of whether an open society, where such criticisms are permitted and even encouraged, has the fortitude and the will to resist external assault. They also raise the issue of whether, if the critics are right, America is worth defending. 

Conservatism is generally the party of patriotism, but in recent years, since the end of the Reagan administration, patriotism on the right has not been much in evidence. This is not just due to post-cold-war lassitude. Many conservatives are viscerally unhappy with the current state of American society. Several right-wing leaders have pointed to the magnitude of crime, drugs, divorce, abortion, illegitimacy and pornography as evidence that America is suffering a moral and cultural breakdown of mammoth proportions. The Reverend Jerry Falwell even suggested that the destruction of the World Trade Center was God's way of punishing America for its sinful ways. Falwell was strongly criticized, and apologized for the remark. But his cultural pessimism is echoed in the speeches of Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer, as well as in books such as Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Patrick Buchanan's The Death of the West, and Gertrude Himmelfarb's The De-Moralizing of America. 

How, then, can we love a society where virtue loses all her loveliness, one that has promoted what Pope John Paul II has called a "culture of death"? Some conservatives say we cannot. A few years ago the journal First Things argued that America had so fundamentally departed from the principles that once commanded allegiances that it was time to ask "whether conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."(16) Pat Buchanan characteristically goes further, asserting that for millions of Americans, "the good country we grew up in" has now been replaced by "a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for."(17)

On the political left, anti-Americanism has been prevalent and even fashionable at least since the Vietnam War. Admittedly a direct attack on the American homeland by Islamic fundamentalists who imprison homosexuals and refuse to educate their women was a bit too much for some, like Christopher Hitchens and David Rieff, who enrolled as supporters of the U.S. war effort. Some on the left, too embarrassed to rationalize mass murder, and too timid to provoke the public's rage, fell prudently silent. But others could not help muttering that "America had it coming" and that "we must look at our own actions to understand the context for this attack." Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, said the United States was responsible for "the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is ultimately rooted."(18) This viewpoint was applauded at a Washington, D.C., town meeting sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.(19) And on the American campus, several professors went further, blaming the United States itself for the carnage of September 11. University of Massachusetts professor Jennie Traschen suggested that America deserved what it got because throughout the world it was "a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression."(20)

These strong words should not have come as a surprise. For years the left-wing opponents of globalization have carried banners in Seattle and elsewhere saying "America Must Be Stopped" and "The World Is Not For Sale." On campuses across the country, professors have been teaching their students what Columbia University scholar Edward Said recently argued: that America is a genocidal power with a "history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust."(21) Many intellectuals and activists have devoted a good deal of their adult lives to opposing what one termed "a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy, its gunboat diplomacy, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its marauding multinationals, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts."(22) Could Bin Laden have put it better? If what these people say is true, then America should be destroyed. 

The most serious internal critique of America comes from the political movement called multiculturalism. This group is made up of minority activists as well as of sympathetic whites who agree with their agenda. The multiculturalists are a powerful, perhaps even dominant, force in American high schools and colleges. The pervasiveness of their influence is attested in the title of a recent book by Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now. This group has become the shaper of the minds of American students. The multiculturalists are teaching our young people that the Western civilization is defined by oppression. They present American history as an uninterrupted series of crimes visited on blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, and natives of the Third World. This is the theme of Howard Zinn's widely-used textbook A People's History of the United States. Other leading scholars affirm Zinn's basic themes. Cornel West, who teaches black studies at Harvard, says that American society is "chronically racist, sexist and homophobic."(23) Political scientist Ali Mazrui goes further, charging that the United States has been and continues to be "a breeding ground for racism, exploitation and genocide."(24)

The reason America exercises such a baleful influence, multiculturalists argue, is that the American founders were slave owners and racists who established what one scholar terms "a model totalitarian society."(25) No wonder that multiculturalists are not hopeful about the future of the American experiment. In the words of historian John Hope Franklin, "We're a bigoted people and always have been. We think every other country is trying to copy us now, and if they are, God help the world."(26)

Multiculturalists insist that immigrants and minorities should not assimilate to the American mainstream because to do so is to give up one's identity and to succumb to racism. As the influential scholar Stanley Fish puts it, "Common values. National unity. Assimilation. These are now the code words and phrases for an agenda that need no longer speak in the accents of the Know-Nothing party of the nineteenth century or the Ku Klux Klan of the twentieth."(27) The multicultural objective is to encourage non-whites in America to cultivate their separate identities, and to teach white Americans to accept and even cherish these differences. For multiculturalists, diversity is the basis for American identity. As a popular slogan has it, "All we have in common is our diversity."

Multiculturalists also seek to fill white Americans with an overpowering sense of guilt and blame so that they accept responsibility for the sufferings of minorities in America and poor people in the rest of the world. One favored multicultural solution, taken up by the Reverend Jesse Jackson upon his return from the recent United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban, is for the American government to pay reparations for slavery to African nations and to African Americans. "The amount we are owed," says black activist Haki Madhubuti, "is in the trillions of dollars."(28)

What we have, then, is a vivid portrait of how terrible America is and of the grave harms that it has inflicted on its people and on the world since the nation's founding. These charges of the low origins of America, and its oppressive practices, and its depraved culture, and its pernicious global influence --- are they true? If so, is it possible to love our country, or are we compelled to watch her buildings knocked down and her people killed and say, in unison with her enemies, "Praise be to Allah"?