This volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World opens as World War II ends and the United States stands at the pinnacle of its power relative to the rest of the world. Indexes of that power abound: In 1950, for instance, the United States accounted for only 6.0 percent of the world population – but 27.3 percent of all economic activity (and a far larger share of industrial production), along with 66.3 percent of world military expenditure. Other forms of American global power were just as significant but harder to measure: the United States had taken the lead diplomatically, treating wartime allies like England and France as junior partners; it took a harsher attitude toward its other major wartime ally, the USSR. Economic and military strength, along with the ability to shape world politics – these very real and concrete forms of global power – were hardly the only dimensions of American power in the decades since World War II.

As the Cold War intensified, Americans grew accustomed to reading events in the developing world through the lens of East-West conflict, colored by enduring assumptions of Third World inferiority. Foreign leaders and movements were regarded as either supporters of the Free World or agents of international communism, “pro-American” or “anti-American.” From a Latin American perspective, this schema made little sense. U.S. Marines had been landing on Caribbean beaches since long before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Successive administrations in Washington intervened to make and unmake governments in Latin America under a variety of rationales: to promote stability, to thwart German influence, to teach democracy, to chase down bandits. By the time the Cold War became the central concern of U.S. foreign policy, there were already plenty of Latin American anti-communists in their own right – especially among business leaders, military officers, large landowners, and the Church – but although divisions between left and right were apparent in the internal political landscape, the notion of a Soviet threat to Latin America seemed hardly credible. For most Latin Americans, political conflict was about land tenure, access to political power, workers’ rights, and disputes with neighboring countries. When Latin Americans worried about subversion or interference by a foreign power, they did not look with apprehension to Moscow in the distant East, but to the nearby North. That is one reason the Cold War seemed so different from a Latin American perspective, and one more reason why the “anti-American” or “pro-American” labels were so ill-suited to the Americas.

There are two ways to write about the history of anti-Americanism. Until now, many scholars – the “anti-anti-Americans” – have taken the term at face value and assembled catalogues of published statements exhibiting animosity toward the United States. These histories often convey the impression of continuity, consistency, and consensus, so that in effect they present a single, transnational tradition of anti-Americanism. From Enlightenment philosophers deriding the New World's climate to Latin American nationalists blaming U.S. imperialism for all their countries’ ills, we are invited to contemplate an apparently unbroken chain of irrational hostility, an enduring ideological mindset with a long pedigree. Anti-Americanism, in the conventional approach, is understood as an obsessive and particular hatred of the United States, expressed in exaggerated language and traceable to a fundamental hostility toward democracy, freedom, and modernity.

This chapter differs. Instead of presenting a history of anti-Americanism as if the existence of such a phenomenon were self-evident, it places that assumption under the microscope and examines how the concept of anti-Americanism arose and evolved into a credo of unusual power. This chapter does not deny, by any means, that many people in many lands at many times have said or written ill-informed, derogatory, and even false and defamatory things about the United States. It does, however, ask us to rethink the imposition of the distorting lens that we call anti-Americanism, because the term itself is burdened with unhelpful myths.