Perspective on the News

Today many Europeans view the Clinton years as a time of transatlantic harmony, but it was during those years that Europeans began complaining about American power and arrogance in the post-Cold War world. It was during the Clinton years that then-French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. And it was during the 1990s that Europeans began to view the United States as a "hectoring hegemon." Such complaints were directed especially at Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whom one American critic described, a bit hyperbolically, as "the first Secretary of State in American history whose diplomatic specialty...is lecturing other governments, using threatening language and tastelessly bragging of the power and virtue of her country."

- Robert Kagan, in his extraordinary book, Of Paradise and Power