Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations is an ambitious and widely researched study. Quickly dismissing attempts to find a transhistorical definition of “anti-Americanism,” Max Paul Friedman's study traces how the term has been used historically and suggests the discursive power it has come to have in specific times and places. In pursuing this goal, it also plumbs the diverse meanings of “America” itself.

This book could be considered a transnational intellectual history – a very difficult genre because of the need to chart the multiplicity of connotations and contexts over time and place. It helps map people and groups who deployed “anti-Americanism” (including those that rallied against it in America itself) and explains why the term has held the rhetorical power to advance a variety of agendas. Such a project might seem to encompass too broad a canvas, but Friedman sensibly narrows his focus to the areas of his greatest expertise: Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

In each area and time, tropes of “anti-Americanism” held different genealogies and served different purposes. He sweeps through some of the disputes over American policies and cultural attributes that arose in the early twentieth century and then provides a more extended discussion of the complex role of anti-Americanism during the Cold War. Domestically, the notion of anti-Americanism – often labeled “un-Americanism” – helped construct the Manichean divide that deeply pervaded all aspects of American culture. In US foreign policy, the near-obsession with “anti-Americanism” abroad encouraged a kind of siege mentality that could cast any criticism or disagreement as a communist threat. Subsequent chapters illustrate how the exaggeration of anti-Americanism shaped and mostly misshaped policies in Latin America and Europe during the 1950s and throughout the era of the Vietnam War. Here, he closely analyzes the US relationship with France, and particularly with de Gaulle, suggesting (as Robert McNamara has also postulated) that US policymakers brushed aside de Gaulle's experienced warnings about their escalating involvement in Vietnam by dismissing his views as nothing more than expressions of anti-Americanism. Similarly, by casting transnational antiwar protests and antinuclear movements as simply the work of anti-American agitators, Friedman submits, US leaders not only misconstrued world politics but heightened the American public's distrust and misapprehension of foreign countries generally.

This smart and significant book not only demonstrates the importance of methodological innovation and transnational research but offers valuable insights about US policymaking – both past and future. It cuts through much of the nonsense that often gets written about “anti-Americanism” (the embattled and self-righteous handwringing over “why they hate us”) and underscores the dangers that arise from the term's persistent use in domestic politics. Helping readers understand why it has been damaging for Americans to become obsessive about “anti-Americanism,” Friedman argues that the constructed categories of being “pro-” and “anti-American” provide a structure more suitable to simplistic “fairy tales” than to sound policymaking. Many aspects of American culture find widespread support around the world, and “there is not much practical utility in the interpretive conceit of ‘anti-Americanism’” (235) when it serves to mask an understanding of international conflicts rooted mostly in rivalries over land, resources, and claims of sovereignty. In the epilogue, he applies his perspectives to an analysis of America's recent wars in the Middle East. In a short review, it is difficult to do justice to the rich and suggestive arguments he develops in this vein.

Friedman's book builds nicely on work by scholars such as Alan McPherson and Philippe Roger, who have studied anti-Americanism in more particular contexts, but it adds considerable depth to the topic by its transnational and comparative frame. It also fits nicely with other scholarship that explores the constructions and uses of historical memory in an international context – a theme Friedman has elaborated in his other work.