Metaphorically speaking, we met afore I wrote this

"Wherever there is mystery, intrigue, romance, in all the strange and dangerous places of the world, there you will find the man called 'X'".
So began each episode of the spy thriller radio program appropriately and unimaginatively called "The Man Called X" from 1944 through 1952.
Those dates are pretty important. World War II, Korea, McCarthyism, the developing atmosphere of fear and hatred of the cold war and the new A-Bombs and Hydrogen bombs...
Arch-American Ken Thurston roamed the world...well, all the world outside U.S. borders...investigating plots, sabotage, etc...
The plots deal with smuggled guns, explosives, drugs, art, radioactive material, murders, kidnappings, rogue scientists, leaked secrets, sabotage, secret documents, notorious politicians, corpses, wetbacks, revolutionaries, foreign ports… even zombies! Except for the zombies, the entire list seems to be ripped from today's headlines.
http://www.otrcat.com/mancalledx.htm
In many ways Thurston WAS the United States, metaphorically speaking. He was smart, powerful, always acting above board and doing right...his enemies were always saboteurs, con men, evil...not pure and righteous as he was. His ally was an accent driven, clearly "non-white" Pagon individual who was dishonest, cowardly, almost as shady as the enemies but acceptable because he was Thurston's ally.
Wherever he went Thurston MOVED events rather than watching them. He was the catalyst, often with little or no provocation other than the obvious script-driven need to participate in action.
Of course, Pagon also was always being manipulated into doing things he did not want to do through blackmail...blackmail that always had some justification to make it acceptable. For instance, in the 1/13/51 episode Pagon is destitute, so Thurston offers him the option of staying outside in a park (in 1951 Cuba in an episode centered around a smuggler of dynamite and "how to commit sabotage" brochures, mind you) or taking the room of a man who committed suicide by running into a propeller.
Remind you of anything? Now, in the context of the time and genre, Thurston was brave, heroic, and a good person righting wrongs around the world with no desire for personal gain.
Yet in other cases, such as the above referenced episode, people sometimes reacted violently, such as the woman who yells at the "Americans, always going around to places they aren;t wanted" or words to that effect and then storming away because she won't stay in the same room as Americans.
It is all a matter of perspective.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-12/01/content_499517.htm
This appeared a couple hours ago. Note who published it.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/13296456.htm
This posted second. Heavily slanted, naturally, but note the similarity...and the differences.
Is the U.S. still acting like the Man Called X? And is that a good thing? This is not a rhetorical question, it is actually something that should require some thought. I would hope, anyway.