McPherson's take on anti-Americanism (ie, "anti-USism") in the cold war Caribbean was written as an historical guide to the 9/11 era and its recurrent themes of "Why do they hate us?" and "How can they hate us?" He explores the wilful naivite behind the plaint by referring us to an earlier era which has merged almost seamlessly with the new.
McPherson takes anti-USism as unique, but I disagree. There most certainly is an anti-Britishism (re: Ireland, India) and anti-Russianism (Poland, the Baltic States.) There doubtless was an anti-Rome-ism too. Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" ("You break it, it's yours, you've bought it") is the historic norm. Great powers, by nature, inevitably act the bull in the global china shop and are as inevitably hated for it. Although more thoughtful policy makers are aware of this dilemma, such knowledge has little practical effect.
McPherson's analysis of anti-Americanism in Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic stresses the underdog resentment of America's neighbors, and suggests anti-Americanism is more an elite than a grass-roots phenomenon. His recounting of the US-Cuba rupture is his key point. In the need of the new revolutionary elite to consolidate sovereignty over their country, Fidel's early pragmatic "Menshevism" gave way to a radicalizing class war and anti-Americanism, both of which were only latent and needed considerable stoking to emerge as a mass force. This echoes the need of conservative elites to promote their own anti-Americanism, to keep the Colossus of the North from trampling their own turf, a problem too remote from the majority's daily struggle for survival.
The US, for its part, conveniently conflated anti-Americanism with Communism as a rationale for extending its cold war battlelines: who else but Commies could find fault with the USA? This raises a question that McPherson seems to avoid: that anti-Americanism might also be a manipulated pretext in Washington, a rationale to pursue policies otherwise morally unacceptable. McPherson quotes US Secretary of State Christian Herter that his Department "applied a series of tests to the Castro regime" in its first ten months, without specifying as to what said tests might have been. But we know that Fidel was not the only one pursuing disingenuous "ambivalence." Anti-Castro actions and McCarthyite red-baiting were already conveniently outsourced to the CIA, exiles, and private agencies, allowing the US to maintain its facade of diplomatic neutrality. The upper middle class, middle-aged white males running the State Department reacted much the same to Carribbean anti-Americanism as they did to the simultaneous civil rights movement at home.
Because at bottom they already knew the answer to their posed question. Without indulging in conspiracy theory, how convenient and necessary it seems for "them to hate us"; how readily the coup d'etat of the Patriot Act was rushed through after 9/11. George Bush's pained query, then, becomes a self-serving rhetorical device, not a puzzled wonder at the way of the world.
Although now a decade old, the book is still timely as the US yet treads the world's turf in endless wars for love and respect; still imposing its way of life - in Stalin's famous phrase - as far as one's army can reach.