Quite the serendipitous typo, the way I spun straw into gold from it. We ought to play the improv game more often, where people throw out some random word like "marches" and we see what we can create out of it.

Your plaint about domestic focus of peace (and other) protests got me to thinking about history. I don't recall hearing about any widespread protests against Hitler or even the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Nor do I recall any widespread protests against the Soviet Union during the 50s, even at a time when most people felt obliged to be extremely anti-Communist. No protests against the Phillipines nor against Spain, back at the turn of the 20th; in the 19th I can't find signs of any protests around the time of the Civil War, in the North against the South, and vice-versa.

Yet during this same span of history, there were often protests about domestic matters. Civil War vets marched on Washington to collect back pay, and again after WWI. There were protests and marches in the Depression about economic conditions, in the 50s by the nascent anti-war movement.

Thinking about Europe, it's true that they regularly have anti-American protests. But they also have, I think, just as many protests against their own leaders.

The pattern suggests two things at work here. One, at a more superficial level, is that we in America are more likely to hear about foreign protests against America than we are about foreign protests about (their) domestic issues.

The second is more fundamental, I think: Democracies always tend to be rougher on their own leaders than foreign leaders and nations. People in democracies understand, instinctively or consciously, that it's their leaders who can be held accountable, and it's toward their leaders that protests are appropriately directed.

The situation in Europe has a fairly simple explanation: The United States claims to be, and often is, the leader of the free world, making us in a way the leaders of European nations too. When we expect other democracies to follow our lead, we're acting as leaders within those countries. Global protests against the United States pretty much always have the legitimacy we've given them, by presuming to lead the world. Yet another case of "be careful what you ask for" etc.

Whether you call it "empire" or use the more fashionable "hegemony" (empire on the cheap), if we think the world revolves around the United States, then we just have to accept it when people around the world protest against us. The only way to stop the protests would be to withdraw from the world.

Gets me to thinking about the philosophical implications of trying to be the "uberdemocracy" over other democracies. It seems to contain a deep contradiction in terms: If we as a democracy want power over other democracies, don't our principles demand that we let the citizens of those other nations vote in our own elections? "No taxation without representation" etc--we fought our own revolution over that issue. Seems to me that any situation in which one democracy dominates others is a situation in which democracy is weakened. It's claimed that democracies don't make war on one another, but possibly our principles requires us to go further and say that democracies shouldn't dominate each other, either. Principles collide with reality--all countries are not created equal.