Probably no later than when it became obvious that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but definitely by the time that we saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, I got the sense that if we were attacked again like we were on 9/11 the world would shrug and say, “Well, what the hell did you expect?”

Bush ran as a candidate on a foreign policy platform that emphasized humility. His presidency wouldn’t be doing feel-good interventions like Clinton had done in Kosovo. He didn’t believe in nation-building. Bush wasn’t calling for some kind of neo-isolationism, but he definitely gave the impression that his government would think long and hard before it entangled our troops in foreign countries’ affairs

Unfortunately, that was a bunch of bull-feathers. His national security advisers, with the exception of Colin Powell, were pulled from the most hawkish and interventionist elements of the Republican Party.

It would be a mistake to blame the 9/11 attacks on Bush’s foreign policy. The plot to fly airliners into our buildings was hatched during Clinton’s presidency and it was a response to Clinton’s foreign policy, especially elements of it that he carried over from the first Bush presidency. Nothing was more responsible than the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. But our embargo of Iraq, our embrace of the Mubarak government in Egypt, and our failure to broker a decent deal for the Palestinians were also contributing factors. It all added up to leave the impression that U.S. foreign policy was hostile and disrespectful to the Muslim world. For at least some of the more radical elements of that culture, our policies were offensive enough to warrant a violent response.

But, for every strike you could make against pre-9/11 foreign policy in the Middle East, you could make a counterargument in our defense. Saddam Hussein really had tried to wipe Kuwait off the map. He really did have a WMD program at one time. Our troops were in Saudi Arabia, at least in part, to help prevent Hussein from massacring his own citizens. Our cozy relationship with Mubarak was a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Agreements, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize. And Clinton worked very hard to achieve a lasting peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. For most of the world, killing 3,000 innocent people in retaliation for these policies seemed either totally unjustified or totally disproportionate. In addition, the people who attacked us were hardly offering the Muslim world a more enlightened form of government. They were fundamentalist assholes.

That is why the world rallied to the United States when we were attacked.

But it didn’t take long for the world to begin changing their minds about that support. The American response to the attacks was intimidating, frightening, and just as disproportionate as the 9/11 attacks themselves. We threw out all of the values we had worked to instill into the post-World War Two international system.

Before long, it began to look like the world would not be remotely surprised if we were attacked again, and most of them would figure we deserved it.

That’s what a lot of Americans still don’t understand. You have to earn good-guy status. And you can lose it in a hurry. As David Ignatius explains in the Washington Post, the meaning of this Nobel Peace Prize can be found in Europe’s gratefulness for a return to sanity in America’s foreign policy.

If you want to understand the sentiments behind the prize, look at the numbers in the Transatlantic Trends report released last month by the German Marshall Fund. Obama’s approval rating in Germany: 92 percent compared to 12 percent for George Bush. His approval in the Netherlands: 90 percent compared to 18 percent for Bush. His favorability rating in Europe overall (77 percent) was much higher than in America (57 percent).

Here is something basic. If people like you, they are less likely to plot to kill you. When we got attacked on 9/11, we didn’t need to agree with the attackers, but we needed to understand why they hated us. Instead, we went about making everyone else hate us. That didn’t make us safer, and it didn’t make the world safer. Obama hasn’t turned around the aircraft carrier that is U.S. foreign policy. No one could do that in nine short months. But he’s won back the good will of a good portion of the international community. You can’t understand why he would receive a peace prize so early in his presidency unless you understand just how profoundly hated we had become under Bush and Cheney. The world is so grateful not to see John McCain and Sarah Palin in charge of this country, that they just want to express their gratitude.

Having said that, Obama has to get this aircraft carrier turned around for good, or this good-will will not last.