By George Weigel
The following article was originally sourced from First Things.
The foreign policy debate in the United States has often been peculiar, in that it’s not infrequently about the United States rather than the world. Throughout history, other great powers have thought about world politics in terms of national interest. Americans typically think about the world through the prism of their image of America.
Thus in the 1920s and 1930s, American isolationists worried that American involvement in Europe’s bloody affairs would corrupt the United States. Two generations later, Vietnam-era neo-isolationists argued precisely the opposite: a racist, imperialist, militarist America (often spelled “Amerika”) was bad for the world. Good America, bad America: how Americans think about our own country has a profound effect on how we imagine U.S. foreign policy.
Thus in the wake of the recent murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, when an Egyptian demonstrator declares “We hate America” and USA Today headlines his declaration above-the-fold on Page 1, Americans (and those who would lead us) quickly divided into two camps.
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