Saturday, February 5, 2005 from Cohutta

The following is from a January 31, 2005 Newsweek article (High Hopes, Hard Facts) by Fareed Zakaria.

Zakaria asked an Indian friend of his why America is unfairly singled out for scrutiny abroad. His friend’s response was, “America positions itself as the moral arbiter of the world, it pronounces on the virtues of all other regimes, it tells the rest of the world whether they are good or evil. No one else does that. America singles itself out. And so the gap between what it says and what it does is blindingly obvious–and for most of us extremely annoying.”

The above is backed up by almost every foreign friend that I have. You can ask why we should care what they think, but if our real purpose is to make a better world, how will it be better if we’re hated for being the international bully?