The Western alliance after 1945 was based on the ability of the European centre to resist the anti-Americanism of the far-Left and the far-Right, in the face of the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union.

The position today for believers in that alliance is less dismal than it was in 2003 when the controversy over the Iraq war was at its height.

Indeed, one of the achievements of the George W Bush administration over the past four years has been its rebuilding of US relations with most of the world's major powers: the US today is on good terms with France, Germany, and South Korea; has strong ties with Japan; a working relationship with China and is closer than ever to India. It is revealing that few commentators have noticed this.

Of the great powers, only Russia, because of its proclivity for assassinating dissidents and shutting off oil supplies, is out in the cold. And it is not just the US's bilateral relations that have prospered: in negotiations over the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programmes, the Palestinian territories, and the genocide in Darfur, the US has worked closely with regional and European powers. If it was US unilateralism that alienated Europeans, then the US should be more popular than ever today.

But the surveys say otherwise. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reports, for example, that only 56 per cent of Britons had a favourable view of the US, and a Financial Times survey found that 36 per cent of Britons view the US as the "greatest threat to global security". Opinion polls are easily biased instruments, but the eagerness with which the BBC and most of the major British newspapers promote disdain for the US is hard for an American visitor to ignore.

The paradox, then, is that while US relations with foreign governments have improved markedly, foreign publics are less impressed. That is the dilemma facing US public diplomacy, and the many governments around the world that want to work closely with the US: close relations between democratic states cannot endure without the support of the people. The problem today is not the isolationism of the American public. Historically, that is unusual: one of the purposes of NATO was to encourage the United States not to give in to its desire to go home.

Today, the threat to continued co-operation of the Western powers lies in the attitude of the European publics. It may be that the spasm of hatred for the US that reached a peak in Western Europe in 2003 will come to be seen in 20 years time as simply being foolish. After all, we now know that Reagan, far from being a simple-minded Cold Warrior, was a more fervent nuclear abolitionist than his opponents. But right now, it is not easy to take the long view – and in any case, the short run matters too.

It is of course true that the Iraq war was unpopular in many countries. But the turn against the US began before Iraq, and built upon a decade of criticism of the US for its attitude towards the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Iraq mattered not just on its own merits, but because it fit so comfortably into the pre-existing European story, which defined the US as an imperial power with a foreign policy dominated by business interests, a description still advanced by between a third to a half of the European voters surveyed by Pew.

As that survey reveals, European attitudes will not change simply because American policies do. That is because it is the narrative that matters in politics. It is the story you accept that tells you which events are important, and that gives meaning to what you notice.

It is essential for the US to argue vigorously for its policies, which it has failed to do. But a point-by-point defence is not enough: the challenge for the
US is to break through the story that disposes too many Europeans to be suspicious of anything the US does, and to ignore anything that is not compatible with blaming America first.

The belief that US policy is a front for business interests is equally one-sided. European commentators would be rightly outraged if President Bush resigned to take a paid job with Gazprom after signing a deal to build an oil pipeline from Siberia to the US for that government-controlled Russian energy giant. This is exactly what German Chancellor Schroeder did in 2005 – but yet it is the American leader, not the European one, who is the tool of the oil industry.

If President Bush ended an investigation of a major US firm accused of offering bribes to win a weapons contract for Saudi Arabia because the investigation would "lead to the complete wreckage of a relationship that is of fundamental importance to the security of this country," the European media would have a field day: weapons, oil, and bribes, all in one.

In fact, those were the words used by Tony Blair in the Commons on June 13, 2007, when he cancelled just such an investigation of a major British firm. Apart from a question from Ming Campbell – and nothing is less threatening than that – this statement drew no response. It did not fit what the public was ready to hear.

The point is not that Prime Minister Blair acted wrongly. It is that the story about the US that has prevailed in Europe since the end of the Cold War is too simple: it is not just American policy-makers who have to make difficult choices between competing objectives, and not just the US that makes mistakes.

In an era defined by the struggle between the international state system and its terrorist enemies, that story is not just wrong: it is a self-righteous and dangerous illusion that it is in the interest
of all democratic countries, and Great Britain most of all, to reject.

Ted R Bromund is associate director of International Security Studies at Yale University. The views expressed are his own.