If the reasons for the failure of Brand USA seem obvious, there are some confusing complexities. Why, for example, are America’s “brand ambassadors” not suffering? Nike may be scarred by its years on the sweatshop leaderboard, but the company has regrouped and this year scored its highest quarterly revenue figure in history, at over half a billion dollars. Back in 2003, McDonald’s had reported its first ever quarterly loss and was a posterchild for brand damage with a reputation for bad food and ugly corporate imperialism. This year? The company’s stock price is double what it was. Even Altria – the forgettable brand that the tobacco barons used to replace the despised Philip Morris trademark – is expected to boost profits by five percent this year.

It isn’t supposed to work this way. During the original Brand America debates, the Journal of Business Strategy published a “brand portfolio molecule” that captured the way that so many people can hold confl icting views of the United States. In anything close to ordinary times, the American “brand” contains racism and civil rights, the Pentagon and the Peace Corps, fast food and the first man on the moon. But these are not ordinary times.

In the past two years, Brand America has been reduced to a brutal simplicity. The word “America” still conjures a jigsaw puzzle of ideas and images, but few if any of these are positive. It is baffl ing for Americans, who still live in and see around them a complex and conflicted nation. The rest of the world sees a cornered animal. American jazz? Yankee aid workers drilling wells in Africa? The Olympic dream as advertised by Nike? These are simply too dissonant to connect with the America of Abu Ghraib, tactical nukes, and the usa patriot Act. They’re like remnants from a former America, before the Dark Ages began.

Walk the streets of Cairo, São Paulo or Vancouver today. The Stars and Stripes, once popular on headbands or sewn onto jackets, has virtually disappeared. It has lost its cool. The young men and women who wore the flag might still dream of escape to America – the richest nation on Earth, still sheltered from the harsh world it is helping to create – but even the appeal of emigration has been reduced to the stark practicalities of survival. No es mejor sino menos mal. Not better, but less bad. The American dream has never been so small. Even before the Iraq adventure there was old poison in people’s blood when it came to America, but now that dark, toxic feeling has crept right into the bone.

Remarkably, the original ‘big three’ Brand America ideals, those of opportunity, democracy, and freedom, may be healthier than they’ve been in a decade. Around the world, nations from Brazil to Pakistan to France to South Korea are debating where they stand in a single-superpower world. As public diplomacy researcher Lawrence Pintak of the University of Michigan has pointed out, America is suffering from an outbreak of its own values, even in the Middle East. “Until recent years, the US government could say one thing and do another,” he notes. “The rise of an aggressively independent media in the Muslim world has changed all that.”

And this is the surprise. The public diplomacy warriors believed their task was simple: carry the banner of American ideals forward into the Islamic world. Instead, they’ve opened a battle for mindshare with everyone from Iranian reformers to mindshare with everyone from Iranian reformers to New York City peace marchers to their own global to their own global corporations. “We are witnessing the emergence of a consumer lifestyle with broad international appeal that is grounded in a rejection of American capitalism, American foreign policy, and Brand America,” argues John Quelch, senior associate dean of the Harvard Business School. The empire dean of the Harvard Business School. The empire has proved to be first and foremost an empire of the mind, and that is where the insurrection is truly mind, and that is where the insurrection is truly in full swing.

James Mackinnon’s first book, a political travelogue of the Dominican Republic, will be published in Fall 2005.