Guards were stationed outside. Harsh looking men with sub-machine guns patrolled the perimeter of this building, and nobody was admitted without proper clearance and photo identification. We were American college students on a trip to Eastern Europe to learn about diplomacy in that region.

The building was the headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, Czech Republic, a place Mohammed Atta once flirted with plans to attack. Its security is threatened by new waves of anti-American sentiment throughout Europe.

Yet unlike Western Europe, which has always had close relations to the United States, the Eastern European nations had always been under the yoke of the Soviet Union. Many of the Eastern Europeans I met on the trip were not swept up in anti-Americanism as we might be led to believe — but they did draw an important distinction between hating our foreign policies and hating our values.

RFE/RL are two radio stations funded by the United States Congress to bring balanced radio journalism to countries that do not maintain reliable news sources. During the Cold War, this meant broadcasting news of the Western world into the Eastern Bloc. The headquarters of the “Radios” as they are called, ironically now find a home in the building that once housed the Communist Parliament of Czechoslovakia.

These days journalists run a U.S.-backed news organization where once Communist Party officials ruled Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. This is but one of the many ironies that exists in Eastern Europe as young democratic nations attempt to forge prosperity and security under the shadow of American influence and the threat of terrorism.

While we were in Europe, the other members of the trip and I were rarely subjected to explicit anti-Americanism from the people we met there. In fact, that region of Europe seems fiercely supportive of American ideals.

They never want to forget the walls that once kept them hidden from the rest of the world. A sentiment that I frequently came across would go something like this: “We love America, and we love freedom,” the native would say, “but we hate your current administration.”

We never heard outrageous accusations or comparisons to Nazism from people who held fresh memories of true tyranny.

The Iron Curtain was more than Winston Churchill’s political metaphor of the time; it was a real wall that spanned the length of Europe. We drove from Vienna and traveled a road near the border of Czech Republic, past an area where a three-story concrete wall topped with barbed wire once kept Czechs from escaping to Austria.

Just 15 years ago, those walls would have been nested with armed guards. Now they are monuments to oppression.

As I was swimming through stories of abuse, arrests and escapes from the Soviet Bloc, I remembered how the loyalty of the Austrians, Hungarians and Czechs were won by Americans in the first place.

The Marshall Plan was the greatest insurance policy against the Soviet threat in Europe because it had a pure motivation: to win hearts and minds by providing aid.

The long-term need for America to win the hearts and minds of a global community became agonizingly clear when I saw those guards patrolling the headquarters of RFE/RL. Widespread hatred, no matter how irrational, can only be countered by justice and compassion.

Eastern Europeans seemed to support the United States because the ones I talked to still believed in the inherent justice of American force. They believed that in the end, our power would be used with responsibility.

The moment they believe our overwhelming authority is tyrannical, we lose them as allies. We must not talk down to our European allies by assuming that they are unwilling or incapable of aiding us in the very righteous cause of stopping global terrorism.

I remember distinctly a tour guide named Fritz that was with us on the trip. He was Austrian, and we were talking about the inherent bureaucracy of the United Nations.

He proposed that even though the United Nations at times is just a forum for diplomatic chatter, it was worth maintaining as an opportunity for international discussion.

He expressed a European sentiment that stemmed from a continent embroiled in the struggle to unify under the European Union. “We have a saying in Austria,” he said. “It goes, ‘As long as the people are talking, they will find a solution.'”