America's vanishing magic

The Iraq war has killed the American "magic," says French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner:

Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, "It will never be as it was before." "I think the magic is over," he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States. U.S. military supremacy endures, Kouchner noted, and the new president "will decide what to do - there are many means to re-establish the image." But even that, he predicted, "will take time."

In a sense, Dr. Kouchner is right: The United States' reputation has been badly dented (for both fair and unfair reasons) and will need time to recover. But there is something remarkably ahistorical about the premise that pre-GWOT America had the world in a spell. I've recently been rereading accounts of the outrage that sundry past American activities created (see, for example, Vietnam, support for Israel, the Grenada invasion, the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe, the bombing of Libya, and the invasion of Panama). It's easy to forget the depth of antipathy to past American policies. After a 1983 U.N. Security Council meeting at which dozens of countries condemned America for its forays in Central America, the Libyan ambassador crowed that "America has no friends!" It has often seemed that way. America's "magic" will ebb and flow, but it hasn't run dry.