Life & Wisdom Quote by Timothy Garton Ash

The barb here is aimed less at Canada and Europe than at the comfortable pastime of identity-by-contrast. Timothy Garton Ash, a writer who’s spent decades watching nations narrate themselves, frames “obsession” as a shared transatlantic tic: the U.S. becomes the giant reference object against which other democracies measure their virtue, sophistication, restraint. It’s a critique of a certain moral self-portraiture that depends on keeping America in the frame, usually at an unflattering angle.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Yet another thing” lands like a weary eyebrow-raise: this isn’t an isolated phenomenon but a recurring pattern. “Distinguishing themselves from it” signals that the point isn’t American power per se, but the dependency it creates in other people’s self-conception. You can’t claim independence while constantly checking the neighbor’s yard. Then comes the sting: “often by crude stereotyping.” That “often” is an insistence on frequency without the cheap certainty of “always,” while “crude” suggests laziness as much as hostility. The subtext is that anti-Americanism can function as a shortcut: a way to avoid confronting one’s own failures by outsourcing them to a caricature of U.S. culture (violent, ignorant, imperial), even when the critique begins with something real.

Contextually, this fits the post-Cold War and especially post-9/11 era where U.S. dominance made America both unavoidable and easy to simplify. Ash is warning that smug differentiation is still a kind of provincialism: it shrinks complex societies into a single foil, and turns critique into a mirror-polishing exercise.