America's necessary myth for the world

The great paradox in the world today is that the “dumb simplicity” of America’s self-perception, as one senior European government adviser put it to me, is both obviously bogus and fundamentally true. The story that America tells about itself is both the source of many of its foreign-policy disasters and the necessary myth without which much of the world would be a more brutal place.

The dumb simplicity of the idea means that the U.S. will continue going around the world offending people and annoying them. It will continue to make catastrophic mistakes, causing much more than offense, overreaching, and being resisted by rival powers. And it means that the U.S. will carry on pulling back when it realizes its myth has bumped up against a different reality. But, as the same government adviser put it to me, “show me a foreign minister in the West who really wants less America.” Certainly not the Ukrainian one…

The dumb simplicity of America’s interventions is often infuriating and obtuse, or even disastrously naive and destructive. It exists in people like Neal and Holbrooke, Bush and Biden. And yet if America stops believing in its myth, if it scurries back into the safety of its continental bunker, having decided it is now just another normal nation, then a cold wind might start to blow in places that have become complacent in their security. When the dumb simplicity is removed, the complexities of the world start growing back.