WASHINGTON AND THE WORLD The Ambivalent Superpower America and the world aren’t getting a divorce. But they’re thinking about it. By ROBERT KAGAN

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/united-states-ambivalent-superpower-103860_full.html?print

POLITICO MAGAZINE

February 27, 2014

WASHINGTON AND THE WORLD

The Ambivalent Superpower

America and the world aren’t getting a divorce. But they’re thinking about it.

By ROBERT KAGAN

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.