America: Fuck Yeah?

Although the last eight years of freakishly aggresive and alienating foreign policy have made it trendy on the left to bitch endlessly about the negative consequences of American hegemony, chances are good that the global economic crisis will change that a bit. In today's NYTimes, Tom Friedman has a defense of a renewed sense of nationalism:

While it is true that since the end of the cold war global leaders and intellectuals often complained about a world of too much American power, one doesn’t hear much of that grumbling today when most people recognize that only an economically revitalized America has the power to prevent the world economy from going into a global depression. It was always easy to complain about a world of too much American power as long as you didn’t have to live in a world of too little American power. And right now, that is the danger: a world of too little American power.

To some degree, this just means that the rest of the world is not inclined to hate us for our freedom, tolerance and comparative power, but instead they'll just hate us when we're assholes. Right?