The editors each contribute impressive essays, with O’Connor’s genealogy of anti-Americanism kicking things off. Having attributed the impressionistic nature of much existing comment on anti-Americanism to definitional ambiguities and imprecision, O’Connor sets out to define the phenomenon, the ascent of which his collection charts. In doing so, O’Connor tackles the term’s capaciousness, contending that a failure to narrow it affords it a dangerously suppressive function, rendering it a label that serves to stifle legitimate criticism. This theme is taken up in many of the essays that follow, most of which essentially adopt O’Connor’s definition of anti-Americanism as an indiscriminate attack on America characterised by prejudiced rhetoric.

If this definition of anti-Americanism denies its intellectual coherence and rationality, it does not deny its importance; the unsurprising consensus to emerge from this collection is that the meaning and significance of the phenomenon must be grasped. Statements such as that by Salman Rushdie that anti-Americanism is ‘an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than radical Islam’ are therefore criticised not for overstating anti-Americanism’s threat, but rather (perhaps harshly, in this instance) for depicting as a rational worldview what is in reality a scattered composite of prejudices and stereotypes.

O’Connor’s essay references a 1990 book entitled The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism. The latter verb’s absence from the title of this collection might suggest a phoenix-like rise from the rubble for the phenomenon. Could this rubble in fact be that of the Berlin Wall? Robert Singh, in a considered deconstruction of anti-Americanism into its component critiques, contends that the collapse of communism ‘deprived the left of its embarrassing “city on a hill” but left intact – in America – its Sodom and Gomorrah’.

The notion that a unipolar world, even under the most benign hegemon, will generate animosity for the preponderant power is hardly new. Griffiths, in an ambitious contribution claiming that US foreign policy is characterised by mutually contradictory goals, argues (less ambitiously) that such resentment arises not from the fact of such power but from the manner in which it is wielded. John Kane contextualises the enmity towards America by stressing its ambivalence, which he attributes to the fact that the myth that America represents is so loved – a recurring theme here.

Kane traces this myth back to the Revolution, and the idea that ‘one day all the world would once again be America in a new era of liberty’. Kane invokes John Locke, who, referring to the ‘natural state’ of American Indians, commented that ‘[i]n the beginning, all the world was America, and more so than it is now’. The irony of the contrast with more recent invocations of universal citizenship – Le Monde’s now infamous headline of 12 September 2001: ‘We Are All Americans Now’ – is not lost on the contributors here. This honeymoon of ‘Americanness’ following the horror of 9/11 was a short era of empathy, and it was an empathy that rapidly dissipated in the wake of America’s subsequent actions.

The book is divided into two parts. The essays comprising Part One examine the nature of anti-Americanism, while Part Two delves into its sources. The essays in Part One, though generally complementary, at times veer toward repetition, with perhaps too many contributors concerned to emphasise the point, well made initially by O’Connor, that the charge of anti-Americanism is a modern-day McCarthyist tool of denigration. In analysing the sources of anti-Americanism, Part Two contains an understandable emphasis on American foreign policy. Identifying a ‘shift to a more transparently assertive American grand strategy’, Andrew O’Neill is critical of the ‘ad hocery’ underpinning the Clinton administration’s approach to foreign policy. Rather than depicting the American approach under George W. Bush as representing a severe break from the past, O’Neill contends that it is in fact a ‘more robust expression of existing themes in American strategic policy articulated under previous administrations’. O’Neill’s attempt to downplay the shift, however, is less convincing when con-tending that ‘[t]he concepts of pre-emptive use of force and preventive war have both been mainstays in American doctrine since World War Two’. Previous consideration of such options hardly compares to their recent execution.

Tony Judt’s arresting closing chapter on anti-Americanism abroad concludes that America’s miscalculation and over-reach will have permanent ramifications: ‘When the earthquake abates, the tectonic plates of international politics will have shifted forever.’ Judt’s essay, and those preceding it, add to our understanding of why the world is shaking.