The Answer to Anti-Americanism?

Last week I wrote about anti-Americanism, arguing that it has become a greater threat than Islamism to the West. Many readers, I know, share my concern. But what is to be done about it? Who is going to transform the image of the United States? In ancient drama, when a tragic conflict had reached an impasse, a god would descend (lowered by some creaking machinery) to resolve the issue. Nothing short of a deus ex machina, it seems, can bridge the trans-Atlantic gulf today.

As if on cue, the day after my column appeared, Condoleezza Rice arrived in Britain. The secretary of state was returning a visit by her British opposite number, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and the two of them performed an elaborate pas de deux for the benefit of the British media.

Their odyssey took them to Blackburn, the constituency for which Mr. Straw sits in Parliament, and which now has a Muslim population of some 25,000, well over a third of the electorate. Perhaps it was an eye-opener for Ms. Rice to see this grim northwestern town, where the foreign secretary regularly abases himself before the Muslim leaders who hold the key to his re-election - most recently to reassure them that he, too, saw the Danish cartoons of Muhammad as a grave insult to the Prophet.

A great statesman who once held Mr. Straw's office, Lord Palmerston, sent a fleet to blockade the Piraeus to force the Greek government to pay compensation for its persecution of a Jewish merchant, Don Pacifico, who had been born in the British colony of Gibraltar. The incident caused a political crisis, but Palmerston saved his government with a famous speech: "As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong," he told the Commons. They loved it.

Today, 156 years later, our timorous Foreign Secretary dare not even protest when an Afghan court condemns a Christian convert, Abdul Rahman, under sharia law to death for apostasy. Mr. Straw, so voluble on the subject of blasphemy, preferred to keep his counsel on the subject of apostasy, leaving it to Ms. Rice and Pope Benedict XVI to save Mr. Rahman by spiriting him into Italian exile. Yet Britain helped to install the Afghan government. Abdul Rahman is the Don Pacifico of our day, but Jack Straw is no Palmerston.

The Rice-Straw double-act culminated in a joint radio interview on the BBC's flagship Today Program. Ms. Rice got as hostile a grilling as you might expect. She returned the blows with interest, while admitting that mistakes had been made and demanding that Iraqi politicians get their act together. She passed the obligatory interrogation about extraordinary rendition with flying colors. (No American I have met can understand why this issue obsesses Europeans. The truth is: it doesn't, but the liberal elite thinks it ought to.) The question of whether she would run for the presidency was brushed aside, but she was careful not to rule anything out.

Mr. Straw kept trying to get a word in, but succeeded only in irritating listeners by repeatedly referring to his American colleague, not with the formality appropriate to an important interview, but as "Condi." He would not have done this with Colin Powell or any other male secretary of state, and his over-familiarity was not reciprocated. The indecent eagerness of the middle-aged man to ingratiate himself with the attractive unmarried woman he had got to know on business trips was not lost on the public. It will have registered the fact that even if the British foreign secretary is no longer a gentleman, the U.S. secretary of state is a lady.

What impressed my 14-year-old daughter, Edith, most about Ms. Rice was an article about her childhood in Birmingham, Ala. Two facts struck Edith: first, that the first black woman (like the first black man) to become secretary of state was appointed by President Bush; and second, that she had emerged from the world of segregation and the black civil rights movement. The subliminal prejudices that Edith and her generation had picked up by a process of cultural osmosis told her that Martin Luther King and George W. Bush were incompatible. Yet here was Condoleezza Rice, living proof that in the United States you could be black, female, successful - and conservative. This came as a revelation to Edith.

So, is Ms. Rice the answer to anti-Americanism? Is she the deus ex machina that U.S. public diplomacy has been seeking? It is not that simple. Mr. Straw's patronizing attitude is not untypical of the European elite. "Condi" will be treated as a token soft cop for as long as the hard cops occupy the White House and the Pentagon.

More importantly, though, there are serious questions about who the secretary of state really is. Is she secretly still the hard-nosed apostle of realpolitik, as she was in her days as Brent Scowcroft's right-hand woman? Is she the born-again neoconservative idealist, the architect of the democratic revolution in the Middle East, as she became after September 11? Or is she now turning herself into something else again - while quietly distancing herself from a president who may be a liability? Will the real Condoleezza Rice please stand up?

If her visit has raised more questions than it answered, that doesn't mean it wasn't a success. But a sobering poll for the Daily Telegraph this week disclosed the extent of the problem. Support for the British presence in Iraq has fallen to an all-time low, with 55% believing that troops should be withdrawn and a similar number concluding that the invasion was a mistake. Opinion is evenly divided between those who want troops out immediately and those who prefer a more gradual pull-out.

Significantly, support for Iraq was even lower among Conservatives than among the public as a whole: only 30%. Stand by for more equivocation from the Tories, not only on Iraq but on the appropriate response to Islamist terrorism at home and in the Middle East All the more reason for Tony Blair to stay in Downing Street, at least until Iraq is stabilized. Who knows? In three years' time, Mr. Blair could still be there to welcome his third US president to Britain on her first state visit.