A year on from the attacks on America, the stunning blow suffered by the United States provokes instinctive sympathy, but that support is nuanced by growing alarm about Washington's post-September 11 foreign policy.
Outside the United States, in most of Europe, Asia and Africa, attitudes are torn between heartfelt horror at the memory of the attacks and disquiet at the looming prospect of war.
Perhaps the most respected international figure of the age - former South African president Nelson Mandela - expressed this ambivalence in a surprisingly bitter attack on the United States in Newsweek magazine, in which he described America's current policy as a "threat to world peace."
Referring to Washington's willingness to ignore the United Nations if necessary to pursue an attack on Iraq, Mandela said it was sending a message that "if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries.
"That must be condemned in the strongest terms," he said.
Indeed in most capitals, the widespread support when Washington launched its war on terrorism in Afghanistan, and eradicated the Taliban regime there, has been transformed into either tacit or outspoken hostility towards the next phase of its international campaign.
Clear support for US President George W. Bush is found only in Britain - and even there Prime Minister Tony Blair is under pressure from within his own Labour party - while in France President Jacques Chirac insists that any military action on Iraq must be endorsed by the United Nations.
Across most of Europe the widespread scepticism towards a man pilloried daily in cartoons as a gun-toting simpleton could sour much further if he is seen as flouting international legitimacy, and many newspapers took the opportunity Wednesday to urge Bush to hold back.
"September 11 initiated a sorry year of violence," said the Guardian newspaper in Britain. "Now if only to spare future generations their own repeat cataclysms, it is time to strut, threaten and fight less, delve and deliberate more - and reflect that though America's cause may be just, its heedless leader's still unfolding actions and aims increasingly are not," it said.
In France, Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of the authoritative Le Monde newspaper, reflected sadly on the United States, which he said was in the worst situation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The reflex of solidarity of a year ago has given way to a wave of feeling which could easily give the impression that throughout the world we have all become anti-American," he said.
He blamed this on an American administration which he said had turned its back on its partners, and replaced an accepted policy of "containment" of international threats with a dangerous resort to "preventive interventionism."
In European cities today many will have reflected on the attacks of a year ago and recalled their horror, but the irony is that an event that led to such a close sense of identity between the two sides of the Atlantic should have led - a year later - to a growing estrangement.
AFP