"The US is a nation built not on ethnicity, not on religion, not even on history but on an idea."

On the subject of anti-Americanism, here is an earlier article by Matt Frei at the BBC that basically tells us this feeling is certainly nothing new, and points to some obvious realities:

To be against the founding of America is not to be original but to continue a long line of misguided bigots who always resented the birth of the US. In the late 18th Century, the eminent Dutch scientist Cornelius De Pauw wrote that everything from America was "either degenerate or monstrous". He was considered the foremost expert on the New World of his time and, like many critics of America, he never went there once.

Then there's the Oscar Wilde quip, plagiarised by former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation". Anti-Americanism is as old as America and it continues to miss the point.

America did not come from nowhere. It was an offspring of Europe, the step-child of a corrupt, moribund post-feudal system. America encapsulated the principles of the Enlightenment - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - wrapped them in the pursuit of happiness, underpinned them with an inalienable right and turned an IDEA into a country.

It took the missteps of the French and the English revolutions and it made them work.

Yes, there were terrible mistakes - the gross hypocrisy of slavery, segregation and McCarthyism, to name a few. But America found and keeps finding the solutions to its mistakes. It is a giant, rolling social experiment in constant pursuit of self-correction. As Bill Clinton once said: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

In America the idea was ragged, rough and imperfect but it kept growing, it kept evolving and, if this isn't a vote of confidence, it kept attracting people, millions of them - Dutch pilgrims, Russian Jews, persecuted Egyptians, hungry Mexicans, uprooted Kurds, homeless Armenians, unloved and underpaid British film stars, now luxuriating in Hollywood. Ask them if they regret the founding of America!

[anti-Americanism] [BBC]