Robert Kagan is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the United States and author, most recently, of The World America Made.

The world never really loved America as much as Americans like to think. In the Eisenhower era, to take one period now seen in rosy hues, Latin mobs pelted Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade with stones, shouting, “Out, dog! We won’t forget Guatemala!” Angry Japanese students protested American “imperialism,” forcing President Dwight Eisenhower to cancel a “goodwill” visit to Tokyo, and Ike spent his days wishing he could find a way to get people in other countries “to like us instead of hating us.” In the late 1960s and again in the 1980s, young Europeans took to the streets by the millions to protest American foreign policy. Even in the 1990s, with Bill Clinton and Al Gore in office, the French foreign minister decried the American “hyperpower,” while leading intellectual Samuel P. Huntington wrote of a “lonely superpower,” widely hated across the globe for its “intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” behavior.

Yes, it’s true that throughout the Cold War much of the world watched American movies and was entranced by Jackie Kennedy, but they also saw segregation, poverty, riots, political assassinations, rampant capitalism, Vietnam and Watergate. And they shook their heads at a country that could elect a cowboy and B-movie actor as its president. The popular narrative following the Iraq War that there was once a time when the world looked up to America, wished to emulate it and eagerly sought its leadership, when America wielded immense “soft power” that gained the allegiance of others simply by the force of attraction, is more myth than history.


Yet always there was the other aspect of the United States, the one most valued if least spoken about. This was the America that others counted on, for security against threatening neighbors, as the defender of the oceans and the world’s trade routes, as the keeper of the global balance, as the guarantor of an economic and political order whose benefits were widely enjoyed. This was the America whose troops were invited into Europe as protection against both a resurgent Germany and the Soviets in the late 1940s. This was the America whose movie-actor president Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher looked to for trans-Atlantic solidarity, and to whom Polish workers and Soviet dissidents turned for hope and inspiration. This was the America that, for all its undeniable flaws, became indispensable after World War II and whose departure from the scene was usually more feared than its presence.

For much of the past 70 years, in short, the world has been ambivalent about American power, both decrying it and inviting it—sometimes simultaneously. Even as Huntington was penning his screed against American arrogance in 1998, much of the world was expressing an entirely different concern—that the United States might be turning inward. It was the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The American president was hobbled. Suddenly, as the Times of London wrote, leaders “in all the world’s trouble spots” were “calculating what will happen when Washington’s gaze is distracted.” The liberal German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, which had been accusing Americans of “camouflaged neocolonialism,” suddenly fretted that the “problems in the Middle East, in the Balkans or in Asia” could not be solved “without U.S. assistance and a president who enjoys respect.” The irony was not lost on some observers. A French pundit took pleasure in noting (in the left-leaning Libération) that those who had only recently been calling the United States “overbearing” were suddenly “praying for a quick end to the storm.”

A decade and a half later, as another U.S. president makes good on his promise to “focus on nation-building here at home,” the world is again wondering whether the country that has been the principal upholder of the global order for the better part of the postwar era is finally pulling back from that outsized and unusual role. Anxiety about American isolationism is once again matching anxiety about American imperialism.

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Over the past year, the World Economic Forum—the same folks who run the annual gathering in the Swiss resort town of Davos—organized a unique set of discussions around the world with dozens of international leaders, from Saudi bankers to Singaporean academics, African entrepreneurs to Latin American economists, seeking unvarnished opinions about the United States and its role in the world. Their ambivalence was palpable. Whether it is arrogance or incompetence, incoherence or insincerity, the critiques of the United States heard in these conversations are extensive—and often justified. There are old complaints about American “unilateralism” and hypocrisy, and new complaints about drones and eavesdropping. There are regions, like the Middle East, where U.S. policy is regarded as having produced only disasters, and others, like Latin America, where the United States is faulted for its failure to pay enough attention (except when its strategic or economic interests are threatened). American motives are often suspect and regarded cynically. Some see the United States pursuing only selfish interests. Others see confusion, an inability to explain what America wants and doesn’t, and perhaps even to understand what it wants.

Anxiety about American isolationism is once again matching anxiety about American imperialism.

Yet what’s striking is not the litany of complaint, but the lament about disengagement one also frequently hears, not the expected good riddance but the surprisingly common plea for more U.S. involvement. Africa wants more U.S. investment. Latin America wants more U.S. trade. The Middle East and Asia just want more: more diplomacy, more security, more commerce. This may come as a surprise to those Americans who are convinced the world not only hates them but also welcomes their decline. But the world, or at least much of it, has moved beyond this post-Iraq narrative, even if we haven’t. These days, many foreign governments fret less about an overbearing America and more about a disappearing America. One way or another, it seems, every region in the world feels neglected by the United States. Setting aside whatever this might say about the effectiveness of Barack Obama’s foreign policy, it says a great deal about America’s role in the world. The problem others see these days is not too much of the United States, but too little.

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Most Americans are probably oblivious to this subtle shift in global sentiment. Foreign policy is not on their minds, except as something to be avoided. Both candidates in the 2012 presidential election went out of their way not to offer any grand—or even not-so-grand—visions of America’s role in the world. To the extent that Obama pitched his foreign policy record at all, he did so around the killing of Osama bin Laden, which today looks like an increasingly symbolic rather than substantive triumph, as jihadists spread across the greater Middle East. Mitt Romney limited his foreign policy pronouncements to sporadic and ill-considered drive-by shootings at Obama’s policies. There was a momentary debate about whether the United States was or was not in decline—Obama said it wasn’t; Romney said it was, because of Obama. But since the election, the American people have grown ever more convinced that the United States really is in decline—more than half of them, in recent surveys—and the president has done little to dispel the impression. Little wonder then that much of the world today worries about American staying power.

Ironically, no U.S. policy did more to provoke global anxieties than one the Obama administration hoped would calm them. The “pivot to Asia,” this “rebalancing” of U.S. diplomatic and military efforts from West to East, was intended to show that the United States was still capable of sober and rational calculation of its interests and capabilities. There would be no more obsession with the Middle East, no more draining wars in obscure parts of the world when the real game was obviously in a rising Asia. Yet the reaction has been both unexpected and revealing. In a world accustomed to seeing the American superpower wielding influence everywhere at once, the notion of pivoting from one region to another has been deeply unsettling—to everyone. In the Middle East, the “pivot” has been widely (and correctly) understood to be a deliberate turn away from intensive American involvement. But Europeans have also interpreted it as a turn away from Europe, and even Latin Americans, rarely the focus of U.S. attention, have seen it as a turn away from them. In the ultimate irony, for all the apprehension it has unleashed elsewhere, the pivot has not produced an equal degree of reassurance in East Asia. There the promise and rhetoric of the pivot has been measured against tangible realities, like defense cuts that leave the U.S. Air Force scrapping exercises with Asian partners and the Navy cutting back on ship movements in Japan. Nor have Asians failed to note that America’s preoccupation with the constantly exploding crises of the Middle East, from Iran to Syria to Egypt to the peace process, has not appreciably lessened, while the president’s attention to Asia has not grown nearly as much as advertised. Obama’s canceled trip last fall to a Bali summit for the region’s major leaders drove home the point. (It didn’t help that the cancellation came amid a U.S. government shutdown that stunned foreign observers.)

Current and former Obama administration officials all tell the same story, of governments in the Middle East, in Asia and in Europe (especially Eastern and Central Europe) constantly seeking reassurances, and whenever possible, tangible evidence, that the United States is not leaving them to their fate. Are American troops in Europe going to be reduced? Does the increase in the number of U.S. Marines stationed in Australia, from 250 to 2,500, have any meaning beyond symbolism? Meanwhile, the movement of U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups, those massive, time-honored symbols of American commitment, is constantly scrutinized as they shift from the East Asian theater to the Persian Gulf and back again. One former Obama official denies that there is really any ambivalence at all about America’s role, at least in the East. “This is the first time in 50 years that there is a unified desire [outside of China] for an American presence,” this former official said—to balance the growing power and influence of Beijing.

Indeed, America’s favorability ratings are well up from George W. Bush’s second term—another sign the world has moved beyond the post-Iraq narrative. Out of 38 countries the Pew Research Center polled in 2013, in only eight did a majority of respondents register an unfavorable view of the United States (five of those in the greater Middle East). In 21 of the 38 countries, the United States enjoyed an approval rating of more than 60 percent (a diverse crowd including Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa and, yes, even France). No doubt this is due in part to Obama’s widely celebrated election. But only in part, for Obama’s personal approval ratings around the world have declined substantially since 2009; in many countries today, America’s ratings look better than Obama’s. Perhaps this reflects the growing perception that the United States really does have an important role to play.

And besides, whether you like America or not, the real question is: Who would you like to see replace it? America’s favorable ratings are a good deal better than China’s, for instance. I listened a few months ago as a Chinese professor lectured Americans at a conference in Abu Dhabi about how unpopular the United States had become around the world as a result of its objectionable behavior in Iraq and on other issues. She was somewhat taken aback when informed that, however unpopular the United States might be, China was even less popular, especially among neighbors like Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Australia. Altogether, out of the 38 countries Pew polled, the United States was viewed more favorably than China in 22.

The attitudes toward China are interesting because they provide a partial answer to the pointed question increasingly asked around the world these days: What would a “post-American world” really look like? Most regard China as the leading candidate to share global leadership with the United States in the coming decades, or perhaps even to surpass it. Yet not many seem to welcome this prospective transition. Even in the Middle East, where Beijing enjoys significantly higher public approval ratings than Washington, few see China as a desirable replacement for the United States. Other possible sources of global stability, meanwhile, have lost some of their luster. Ten years ago, some imagined a new order based on the European model, with the European Union playing a leading role in the world and EU-style institutions being replicated in East Asia. Today, a Europe hobbled by political and economic difficulties seems like a less plausible alternative. Nor is there much enthusiasm for the United Nations, continually stymied as it has been by perpetual Security Council standoff.

These days, many foreign governments fret less about an overbearing America and more about a disappearing America.

So while it is easy to be unhappy with American foreign policy, it is harder to imagine a world where the United States does less. If the American-backed order gives way, many fear, there will not be a smooth transition. If America continues to reduce its role in the Middle East, predicts a former central banker from North Africa, “the next quarter century is … going to be very, very messy,” marked by “disorder more than order.” Kishore Mahbubani, a well-known theorist of a rising Asia, welcomes a multipolar world because, in his view, “the United States is better off being restrained.” But even he does not deny the possibility that as China grows more powerful it could end up undermining a global order that was, after all, devised by the West to serve the interests and values of the West. Others are even more skeptical that the Chinese are likely to take on global burdens if America’s ability to do so fades. As a former high-level Brazilian official put it, “Up until now, China is like a very rich person who goes to the restaurant, asks for a very big table and, when it comes to paying the bill, always goes to the toilet—it doesn’t pay.”

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To many, the question is not whether the United States can or should continue to play its leading role in the world, but whether the American people and their president even want to. The signals coming from Washington in recent years are not encouraging. The world, for so long ambivalent about American power, is now confronting an America that is at least as ambivalent about continuing to wield it.

Nothing drove this point home more than Obama’s eleventh-hour decision late last summer to cancel a potential military strike in Syria, cutting a deal with Russia to get the Syrians to give up their chemical weapons. As Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief, complained this past December, when American red lines become “pinkish” and “eventually end up completely white,” it creates an “issue of confidence” among U.S. allies. Nor was this reaction limited to the Middle East. The American decision reverberated across the planet, perhaps nowhere more so than in East Asia, where America’s willingness to use force is very much on the minds of allied governments as China voices its territorial claims against assorted neighbors ever more aggressively. As Ravi Velloor, the foreign editor of Singapore’s Straits Times, argues, “It’s one thing to have enormous power. It’s another thing to show you have the will to use it.”

The American people have grown ever more convinced that the United States is in decline. Little wonder then that much of the world worries about American staying power.

It is safe to say that most Americans today would not see it that way. In September, when Obama turned to Congress to authorize his Syria strike, the public response was unmistakably negative. Yet the situation in Syria was no more complex, and the efficacy of a military solution no less obvious, than in Kosovo, where President Clinton ordered U.S. participation in a NATO air campaign in 1999. The public did not support that action at first, either, but Clinton didn’t seek a vote and Americans quickly came around. Would the public have done the same had Obama gone it alone? Perhaps. But the heated opposition across partisan and ideological lines suggests there were bigger questions involved than the particular dangers of attacking Syria. Americans were not just asking why they had to care what happens when people are killing each other 6,000 miles away. They were also asking a much broader question about America’s role in the world.

The American people’s expansive impulses have always competed with a strong desire to be left alone, of course. Since the 1890s, when America first emerged as one of the world’s strongest countries, defeating Spain and acquiring the Philippines in that “splendid little war,” U.S. foreign policy has looked like a sine wave: periods of high global involvement and interventionism followed by periods of disillusion and retrenchment. In less than two years at the end of World War I, Americans sent 2 million men to fight in France; five years later, they would not keep even 5,000 in place to help prevent the next war. In the Eisenhower years, the United States had nearly a million soldiers permanently deployed overseas. There are currently fewer than 200,000, but Americans, despite a U.S. population nearly twice as large as in Ike’s era, feel desperately overstretched.

The sine wave reflects this dualism: Americans periodically seek to reshape the international environment, but then they grow weary of the burden, disillusioned by the imperfections, failures and outright mistakes that inevitably attend such efforts, and resentful of the costs. They then seek to reduce their role in the world, and the cycle begins again. But the inherent expansiveness of the American people, their commercial drive, their immigrant ties to old homelands and universalist ideology, means that they never really withdraw from the world—Americans are quite incapable of genuine isolationism. So, it is only a matter of time before events occur and perceived dangers arise that touch on American interests, or grossly violate American ideals, and which Americans come to decide are intolerable. And the sine wave bends up once more.

Today, there is no doubt, though: Americans are in a trough on that graph. Their ambivalence is easy enough to understand. Two long wars have produced mixed results, to say the least. A painful recession has blunted enthusiasm for costly commitments of any kind, especially those outside our borders. How long and deep will the trough be this time? After World War I, it was very deep indeed and lasted the better part of two decades, until Pearl Harbor. After Vietnam, it lasted less than seven years, until the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There is no simple correlation between the state of the economy and Americans’ willingness to pursue a vigorous and even costly policy abroad. The increases in defense spending and global activism that began under Jimmy Carter and accelerated under Ronald Reagan took place when the country was suffering from an unprecedented bout of “stagflation.” Nor was America any less war-weary after a decade in Vietnam, with 58,000 Americans dead and more than 150,000 wounded, than it is today after more than a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the answer has to do with presidential leadership. Presidents can either reinforce public opinion or push back. In the aftermath of World War I, when the American public soured on overseas involvement, a series of Republican presidents, from Warren Harding to Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, tried to give the public what it wanted. In the process, they reinforced and hardened public opposition to overseas involvement. The task, Harding said, was not to settle problems abroad but to make sure “our own house is in perfect order.” He promised to “prosper America first.”

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt took a different approach, pushing back, at first tentatively but then ever more vigorously, trying to convince the American public that it was making a mistake. By Pearl Harbor, as a result of his efforts, the United States was already in the fight against Nazi Germany in all but name. The American public had gone from refusing to play any role in Europe to insisting on supporting Britain to the fullest, even at the risk of war. Reagan played a similar role in his campaign for the presidency, warning of the dangers of American weakness just a handful of years after Vietnam.

Rather than push against the public’s desire to withdraw from the world, Obama has encouraged it.

So far, Obama has been acting more Harding than FDR. Rather than push against the public’s desire to withdraw from the world, he has encouraged it. There has been a synergy between president and people, a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. This, too, is not surprising. Obama ran and defeated both Hillary Clinton and John McCain as the anti-Iraq candidate. He then made rolling back the “tide of war” the core of his identity as president. The explicit rationale for most of his foreign policies has been the need to dig the nation out of the hole left by the previous administration’s interventions. That has meant, above all, an avoidance of other wars, but also a more modest involvement in the world, a deliberate effort to let other nations play a bigger part in shouldering the burdens of leadership.

Given the degree to which the Obama administration has shaped its policies as a response to the Iraq War, it is little wonder Americans remain captive of the post-Iraq narrative, even as much of the rest of the world has moved beyond it. According to Pew, fully 70 percent of Americans polled believe that “the United States is less respected by other countries than in the past.” This is demonstrably untrue, but the percentage of Americans who believe it is up from 56 percent in the months after Obama took office. More than 50 percent today also believe the United States plays “a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago,” up from just 20 percent who felt that way in 2004. This is at least part of the explanation why, again according to Pew, an all-time-high percentage of Americans, 52 percent, believe the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” That is up from just 30 percent in 2002.

And so the world is now characterized by a dual ambivalence: the world’s ambivalence toward American power and Americans’ ambivalence toward the world. It is hard to be optimistic about the void this leaves. Americans may believe or hope that other countries will step in to fill the void, or perhaps they are not fully aware that there will be a void. They may not care one way or another. Others, however, have little choice but to care. It is a peculiarity of the international system that for reasons of geography, natural resources, population size and the stable nature of their political system, Americans will be among the last to suffer if the world order does break down as they retreat behind their oceans. Those regions of the world that exist on the front lines will not be so lucky. Which is why today’s ambivalence in those places is already starting to shade over into anxiety.