Probably the inability to give up the attitude usually known as "American Exceptionalism." The idea that there is one rule for everybody else, and one rule for America.

This doesn't cause such a huge problem with the developed world (Europe, Japan, Korea) because the US has a unique historical relationship with each of those regions that sort of justifies the exceptionalism in each case. But the developing world mostly doesn't have a historical relationship with the US within which the exceptionalist assumption makes sense.

So you have tired rhetorical games like China and India effectively telling the US, "you enjoyed dirty growth in the 1890s and now you are denying us the same opportunity and demanding clean growth."

The "but America is special" argument doesn't really work in these discourses. These countries view America as just another country that happens to be the richest and most militarily powerful at this point in history. By contrast, Europe for instance did concede the "special" argument when it was gradually yielding political space to America in the first half of the 20th century (why that was is a much longer discussion, but in brief it has to do with the fact that Europe felt parental towards America, and everybody is willing to believe that their child is special).

So America has to learn to manage foreign policy without recourse to the (implicit or explicit) appeal to American exceptionalism.

I'd say the handling of Libya (and to a lesser extent, Burma) is a sign that the US is learning this new role in the global grand narrative quite well.