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But democratization inside Great Britain and out caught up to the empire by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they struggled with extending the suffrage within the British Isles, the British had no mechanism for, or interest in, making voting citizens out of 250 million Indians, or for that matter any of the empire's other nonwhite colonial subjects. In the end, this limit on British tolerance, together with the increasing costs of imperial rule and the rising demand for self-determination after World War II, tore the empire apart.

In the twenty-first century, the right of all nations to govern themselves, while not always realized, is almost universally recognized. As an ironic result, America's relationship to the peoples it dominates is more analogous to that of Achaemenid Persia than that of Rome or Great Britain. Under Persian hegemony 2,500 years ago, “a Greek felt that he was a Greek and spoke Greek,” and “an Egyptian felt that he was an Egyptian and spoke Egyptian.”16 And so it is today under the hegemony of the world's first democratic hyperpower.

The great mistake made by those championing an American empire lies in assuming that the global spread of free markets, democracy, and American products, brands, and consumer culture would somehow “Americanize” other nations, creating common values and even a desire for American leadership. This assumption was as naive as the belief that liberated Iraqis were going to greet American troops with sweets and flowers. Wearing a Yankees baseball cap and drinking Coca-Cola does not turn a Palestinian into an American.

It's one thing for a rising power to make itself a haven for the persecuted and to hold out its institutions of tolerance as an example to be emulated throughout the world. It's an entirely different thing for a global hegemon to take on the task of spreading those institutions to—or imposing them on—the rest of the world without extending American citizenship to foreign populations or in some other way creating a common political identity with them. To the dismay of many well-intentioned Americans, the United States’ recent attempts to export Western tolerance, including free markets and democracy, has provoked the resentment and in some cases violent wrath of millions who see it as imperialism and a threat to their way of life.

Anti-Americanism is of course most intense in the Islamic Middle East, where Uncle Sam is often portrayed as blood-spattered and shark-toothed, feasting on the flesh of Muslims. The Saudi princess Reem al-Faisal, granddaughter of the late King Faisal, recently delivered a particularly scathing attack: “How dare America look the rest of the world in the face It is time for the American nation to acknowledge its crimes and apologize and ask forgiveness from the many people it has harmed…The U.S. should leave Iraq after apologizing for over a million dead after an unlawful embargo and a colonial war which at best is a farce and at worst a crime.” In Latin America, even pro-market elites such as Oscar Arias Sanchez, a Nobel Prize winner and former president of Costa Rica, protest that America “wants to tell the world what to do. You are like the Romans of the new millennium.”17 Resentment and distrust of the United States extend beyond the developing world. In 2005, a Pew poll of fifteen major countries outside the United States found that a majority of respondents (both collectively and in each country surveyed) would favor “another country challenging America's global military supremacy.”18 According to a 2007 BBC survey, 51 percent of respondents all over the world believed that the United States had a “negative influence on the world,” giving America a less favorable ranking than North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela.19

Yet people around the world are not lining up to immigrate to North Korea, Russia, or Venezuela. The truth, particularly in poorer parts of the world, is that attitudes toward the United States are deeply schizophrenic—a perverse blend of admiration and envy on one hand and seething hatred