There's a story the American writer PJ O'Rourke loves to tell about anti-Americanism. Covering Lebanon's civil war in 1984, he kept getting stopped at Hizbollah-run checkpoints. Eventually he reached one staffed by armed teenagers wearing “Kill America Satan Devil” T-shirts. When O'Rourke produced his American passport, one kid began berating him, “telling me how all the terrible things wrong with the world were caused by America - poverty, war, injustice, Zionism”. Finally the kid stopped, and told O'Rourke his career plan: he aimed to study dentistry in Dearborn, Michigan.

The story perfectly captures the feelings of many people worldwide towards the west: a mixture of hatred and desire. It's probably how some Native Americans felt about Columbus in 1492. Anti-western leaders such as Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini, Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez all distorted and exploited these anti-western feelings. But if the west really is losing global significance - as recently displayed in Syria - then anti-western movements are in trouble. Western military and economic decline could reduce anti-western feeling. In other words, by becoming weaker we westerners may become safer.

Ever since Columbus, we have been getting into people's faces worldwide -first as colonisers, then during the cold war and, later, in the “war on terror”. Sometimes we intervened on the side of good against evil, sometimes for evil against good and, more often, for bad against bad. Foreign-policy “realists” say we need a global presence to protect our interests. There is something in that. Moreover, intervention gives western foreign-policy types something to do. However, the flipside is that if you keep getting into people's faces, sometimes they will hit you.