History shows that nations will gang together to tie down great powers, lest they drowned out by the behemoth.
For decades, the United States had been the exception to that rule. Part of that was because of the Cold War. Part of it was because the U.S. went out of its way to show the rest of the world it had nothing to fear.
All past administrations, Republican and Democrat, have been deferential, almost to the point of excess, to the weaker powers. This administration was the first to eschew all that and say right up front that American power should be used just to serve American interests.
Much of the world, including even Old Europe, for all their smugness and ing and moaning, ultimately looked to the United States to be the vanguard of Western ideals, to be a moral leader not because it was easy or efficacious, but because the American people believed they were exceptional, and strove to set a higher standard.
The U.S. is so powerful that the decisions it makes affect the lives of the majority of the world's populations. When the U.S. starts making clear it that it alone is going to decide the fate of all those people, it seems natural that people are going to start to band together and resist. They were willing to live under American exceptionalism, but they will resist American triumphalism.
Even as powerful as the U.S. is, if all the peoples of the world band together to curtail American power, they will succeed. Our past leaders had the insight to understand how special it was to be a global superpower, and yet have so much of the world be content with it, and not offer up that much resistance. This Administration has been the first since WW2 to take American power for granted.
(This is one reason why issues like redefining torture can cripple us. Let's say hypothetically torture has some benefit in extracting information out of Islamic terrorists. The tradeoff is that the rest of the world sees that Americans are no longer going to concern themselves with being exceptional, that they are going to act like any other nation does, and thus no longer can be trusted with the power they wield. So the world will start working together to constrain that power.)
This is why the United States currently is weaker than it has been at any time since WW2 ended, at a time in history when that power really could come in handy. We still have our economic might, and a significant fraction of the military might we enjoyed six years ago. But our ability to lead and to persuade the rest of the world has been eviscerated.
There has always been resentment and envy around the world for the position America finds itself in. Decades ago, European leaders would come to the U.S. and talk nice to the Presidents and do all the friendly photo-ops, then go back to Europe and tell their own media what a dope the U.S. President is.
But while there always has been resentment, there has not been a will to gang up on the U.S. But now the genie is out of the bottle. Bush himself has been much more interested in the agendas of allies and potential allies in his second term, and it has borne some fruit. But the damage of his first term has been done, and the nations of the world understand that even when Bush leaves office, there is still a good chance somebody similarly indifferent to the rest of the world, and willing to press American power for America's benefit, everybody else be damned, can get into power here.
The response to Chavez and Ahmadinejad in that light was not so much endorsement of their ideas, so many of which are insane, as it was an outlet for the resentment and disillusionment a lot of nations feel over the events I describe.
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