As a consequence, a less-varnished image of the United States, entertained by America’s immediate neighbor to the south, was largely ignored until some decades into the twentieth century. For Mexico, the new America was something very different: an expansionist and territorially greedy power, ruthless in its pursuit of material interests, imperialist in its international ambitions, and hypocritical in its democratic affectations. And while Mexican history itself is not above reproach, much of its national grievance against America was grounded in historical fact. America expanded at Mexico’s expense, with an imperial momentum and territorial avarice not quite in keeping with the young American republic’s attractive international image. Soon thereafter, the momentum of that expansion resulted in the planting of the American flag in the Hawaiian kingdom and some decades later even across the Pacific, in the Philippines (from which the United States withdrew only after World War II). Cuba and parts of Central America also had encounters with US power that were reminiscent of Mexico’s experience.
Elsewhere, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes toward America were more mixed. Parts of South America were initially captivated by America’s rejection of European domination, and some also imitated America’s constitutional innovation. But the Monroe Doctrine, which barred European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, was viewed ambivalently, with some South American suspicions that its real motivation was self- serving. Political and cultural antagonism gradually surfaced, especially among the politically active parts of the middle-class intelligentsia. Two South American countries with regional ambitions, Peron’s Argentina and Vargas’ Brazil, explicitly challenged American regional domination during the twentieth century. The countries of Asia, geographically more remote and with their own political awakening delayed, were also vaguely attracted by America’s remarkable material development but they lacked Europe’s intellectual excitement and ideological affinity.
During the twentieth century, America’s global standing twice reached soaring heights. Its first occurrence was in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and its second was at the end of the Cold War. America’s then new international status was symbolized by President Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, which contrasted sharply with Europe’s imperial and colonial legacies. To the practitioners of international power, it was evident that America’s militarily significant intervention in World War I and, even more, its preeminent role in defining new principles of national self-determination for the intra-European rearrangements of power marked the entry on the world scene of a mighty state endowed with unique ideological and material appeal. That appeal was not diminished even by the fact that for the first time the idealized America was closing its gates to foreign immigration. More important, so it briefly seemed, was that America’s new global engagement had began to reshape the basic patterns of international affairs.
However, the Great Depression a mere decade later was a warning signal of the American system’s internal vulnerability and a jolt to America’s global appeal. The sudden economic crisis, with its massive unemployment and social hardships, highlighted both the basic weaknesses and the iniquities of the American capitalist system as well as the related absence of an effective social safety net (with which Europe was just beginning to experiment). The myth of America as the land of opportunity persisted nonetheless, largely because the rise of Nazi Germany posed such a direct challenge to the values that Europe and America professed to share. Moreover, soon thereafter America became Europe’s last hope once World War II broke out. The Atlantic Charter codified those shared but threatened values and acknowledged, in effect, that their survival was ultimately dependent on America’s power. America also became the central point of refuge for European immigrants fleeing the rise of Nazism, evading the scourges of war, and increasingly fearing the spread of Communism. Unlike earlier times, a much higher percentage of the new arrivals were well educated, thus tangibly benefiting America’s social development and international standing.
Shortly after the end of World War II, America faced a new challenge: that of systemic rivalry with the Soviet Union. The new rival was not only a serious competitor for global power, but it also offered an ambitious alternative of its own in response to humanity’s quest for a better future. The combination of the Great Depression in the West and the emergence of the Soviet Union as World War II’s major geopolitical victor—with Moscow by the late 1940s dominating much of Eurasia, including at the time even China—further enhanced the appeal of Soviet Communism. Its crude and more ideologically contrived combination of idealism and materialism thus contended on a global scale with the promise of the American dream.
From its revolutionary beginnings, the new Soviet state asserted that it was in the process of creating the world’s first perfectly just society. Confident in the unique historical insights of Marxism, the USSR ushered in a new age of deliberately planned social innovation, allegedly based on egalitarian principles institutionalized coercively by an enlightened leadership. Coercive idealism in the service of rational materialism became the contagious utopian formula.
Though driven by mass terror, forced labor, large-scale deportations, and state-sponsored murder, the Soviet formula struck a chord with many in the politically awakened humanity shaken by two successive and enormously bloody wars. It was attractive to the poorer strata of the more advanced West, whose confidence in industrial progress was undermined by the Great Depression, to the increasingly anticolonial masses of Asia and Africa, and especially to radical intellectuals in search of historical certainty during a century of upheaval. Even shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the experiment was barely under way in the midst of social deprivation and civil war, it drew affirmations of fealty from visiting foreign intellectuals reminiscent of America’s early impact. “I have been over into the future, and it works,” famously proclaimed a starry-eyed leftist American political writer, Lincoln Steffens, after a brief visit to Russia in 1919.
In the decades to follow, that conviction provided the framework for the widespread glorification of the Soviet experiment and for the indifference toward, and even the justification of, the unprecedented scale of its mass killings. Whether it was Jean-Paul Sartre or Kim Philby, Anglican clerics or Quaker preachers, anticolonial political activists from Asia or Africa, or even a former Vice President of the United States visiting a Soviet concentration camp that was presented to him as a social rehabilitation center, the notion that the Soviet Union’s deliberately “rational” construction of the future was an improvement on America’s largely spontaneous development became widely appealing in an age when for the first time social engineering seemed feasible.
The deceptive lure of the Soviet system was buttressed by claims that in the Soviet Union social equality, full employment, and universal access to medical care were actually becoming reality. In addition, by the mid-1960s, Soviet successes in the initial phase of the space competition with the United States, not to mention the buildup of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, seemingly foreshadowed an inevitable Soviet triumph in the broader idealistic/materialistic rivalry with America. Indeed such an outcome was even officially predicted by Soviet leaders, who publicly asserted that by the 1980s the Soviet economy would outstrip America’s.
This first overt systemic challenge to America came to an abrupt end a quarter of a century later, more or less at the time when the Kremlin expected the Soviet Union to achieve global systemic preeminence. For a variety of reasons—with some rooted in Soviet foreign policy errors and some in domestic ideological sterility, bureaucratic degeneration and socioeconomic stagnation, not to mention the mounting political unrest in Eastern Europe and hostility from China—the Soviet Union imploded. Its implosion revealed an ironic truth: Soviet claims to systemic superiority, so echoed by external admirers, were exposed as a sham in almost every social dimension. This grand failure had been obscured by the intellectually appealing pretense to “scientific” social management claimed by a ruling elite that cynically hid its privileges while exercising totalitarian control. Once that control cracked, the disintegrating Soviet political system unveiled a society of relative retardation and deprivation. In reality, the Soviet Union had been a rival to America in only one dimension: military power. And so, for the second time in the twentieth century, America stood peerless.
It seemed for a while after 1991 that America’s triumph might last for a long time, with no rival in sight, imitation worldwide, and history seemingly halted. With systemic rivalry thus considered to be over, American leaders, in a somewhat ironic imitation of their fallen Soviet rivals, began to speak confidently of the twenty-first century as another American century. President Bill Clinton set the tone in his second inaugural address of January 20, 1997: “At this last presidential inauguration of the 20th century, let us lift our eyes toward the challenges that await us in the next century. . . . At the dawn of the 21st century . . . America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.” He was echoed, much more grandly, by his successor, President George W. Bush: “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world” (August 28, 2000).
But before long, the combination of China’s impressive leap into the top ranks of the global hierarchy— resurrecting national anxiety dormant since Japan’s spectacular economic rise during the 1980s—and America’s growing indebtedness in the 2000s generated rising uncertainty regarding the longer-term durability of America’s economic vitality. After 9/11, the vaguely defined “war on terror” and its expansion in 2003 into a unilateral war of
