First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.