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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. 
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. 
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 
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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 
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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 
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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. 
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." 
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 
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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." 
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 
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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 
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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. 
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 
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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. 
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. 
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