The acrimony between the Obama administration and Israel over new building in Jerusalem was supposedly over appearances, timing, dissing the U.S., etc. But that concern over symbolism works both ways. While we have brewed up a new crisis with Israel over its supposedly horrendous act of building homes, we say nothing to the Palestinians about the far more abhorrent symbolic act of naming a town square in honor of a mass murderer. Meanwhile, President Obama has just sent another video to Iran, reminding Ahmadinejad et al. of his prior outreach — this to a regime that both boasts about mass murdering to come, and sends its agents into Iraq to kill Americans.

Taken individually, each of these incidents can invite discussion and debate. Taken together, they raise the question that has so often been raised over the past year: Why does this administration hector or ignore our friends, while it appeases our rivals and enemies?

Various answers have been given: Allies are passé; they offer no chance for headline diplomatic breakthroughs brought on by our president’s charisma and postnational magnetism. At the same time, in their distrust of what America has traditionally stood for (a powerful, proud, free-market Western nation), belligerents abroad like Castro, Chávez, and the Palestinians voice themes that Americans like Van Jones or Anita Dunn (to take a symbolic pair) share. Thus, the flip side to nationalizing health care, banks, and student loans at home is to look sympathetically at those who long ago did the same abroad. Seen in that light, the growing rejection of Britain or Israel is the logical symbolic bookend to the Obama administration’s multicultural, statist agenda here at home. Another answer is that, like academics who rarely venture out from the university lounge, the members of this administration think our enemies and rivals listen to reason and logic and were deemed difficult only because of a sort of anti-Enlightenment denseness in past administrations, and especially the Bush administration.

Whatever the cause, the effect is now clear: there is no such thing any more as allies and rivals, much less friends and enemies. That Manicheanism is part of our Neanderthal past. We won’t judge anyone abroad on what he does or says — unless he represents forces of traditional privilege and is sympathetic with traditions within the United States that we are desperately trying to shed.

The problem is obvious. The thuggish regimes that we court, given the value systems that have made them what they are, will interpret all this as either disingenuousness or the decadence of those who don’t even believe in themselves. And so the pressures on us to engage in ever more appeasement will only magnify. Because America now apologizes for everything, and China and Russia for nothing, soon the impression will be fixed abroad that America has a lot to atone for and its authoritarian rivals nothing to answer for. Pressures for constant concessions and reparations will mount on democratic us, and lessen on autocratic others.