I was in a TGI Friday's in Cairo last October, sharing dessert with a group of stylish young Egyptian women, when one of them flipped open her cellphone to show me this text message: SATURDAY NIGHT DANCE PARTY BOMBS IN WORLD TRADE CENTER DJ OSAMA BIN LADEN FLY-IN COURTESY OF AMERICAN AIRLINES

My companions, two lawyers and a medical student, laughed with delight, the sounds blending with American pop music and the wind from the Nile.

In the months after September 11, I found these paradoxes around the world: Westernized Egyptian party girls who consider Osama bin Laden a hero; an environmental activist in Indonesia who admires McKinsey consultants and Afghan Jihadis; a Hindu nationalist in India who called America a corrupt cultural wasteland and then told me wistfully, "The world is waiting to become you."

I concluded that America sits at the center of a world of passions that we cannot control and hardly understand. We have become the global icon of modernity, the aim of ambitions and appetites everywhere. Wealth, security, prestige, power, are all America. We are every imperial capital the world has known: a Rome of power, a London of commerce, and a Paris of culture. Yet our empire is a new kind, governed more by seduction than by force and mostly invisible to us who live at its center.

We are a lightning rod for anger everywhere, whether or not its origins have anything to do with us. Life in the frenetic cities and new slums of poor countries -- even more than life anywhere else -- is full of small humiliations, confusions, and defeats. People take comfort from big stories about the lost greatness of their race, religion, or nation, and find dignity in the false promise that political violence can restore greatness. America plays the villain in stories we did not help to write because we stand for the modernity that inspires both eager hope and bitter resentment -- often within the same divided soul.

We are not cut out for this role. Americans tend to see our values as natural: we think that, while being French is an affectation, Russian a perversion, and Salvadoran a deprivation, being American is no more or less than being human. We expect people to jump at the chance to become just like us, from Afghan women lining up at beauty salons to Chinese-immigrant entrepreneurs voting Republican in a few decades. We think of the people who hate us as medieval rather than the up-to-date warriors they are, educated fanatics with recruitment videos modeled on video games and admirers in TGI Friday's everywhere. We forget that just as European modernization produced democracy, fascism, and communism, the changes sweeping over the world now will produce complicated and terrifying hybrids of old and new.

Forgetting is a great American virtue. Because we treat history as recreation rather than identity, we can absorb wave after wave of immigration and cultural change without trauma: Witness the changing attitudes toward homosexuality, or the commitment to racial equality in a country that within living memory embraced white supremacy. But the same forgetfulness that sometimes helps us to be decent at home can disable us abroad, because we tend to face each new conflict with the innocence of a people without history. This sometimes has the effect of driving the rest of the world insane.

It is crucial that we try to make sense of all this. I think most of the "globalization" debate was superficial, and so is today's idea that we're battling the forces of the past or fighting to rid the world of evil. What America is doing is making the case -- sometimes well, sometimes very poorly -- for the very idea of liberal democracy, for a future with more freedom, more tolerance, and more prosperity than the nationalist and fundamentalist alternatives. Whenever we are ignorant, hypocritical, opportunistic, or arrogant, we weaken the case for our version of the future and undercut people in every country who are working toward it. They didn't ask us to be the representatives of the future, but they are stuck with us, and we can't refuse our special position. Human irrationality and violence teach again and again that freedom is neither natural nor inevitable, but a fragile achievement anytime, anywhere.