The American Daydream

Walter Lippmann's Rivalry of Nations fascinates me in its highlighting of the fundamental hypocrisies and flaws of cultural and diplomatic American psychology. Since its inception as an independent nation, the United States has viewed the world in a lens of extremes. In World War I, the United States represented the ideal society for European nations to aspire towards emulating, as shown in the nation's initial "neutrality"; this same ideology, however, led to the US entering World War I to forcibly impose its way of life on smaller European nations. Lippmann underlines the hypocrisy of imposing democratic way of life in order to halt the imposing of other powers' ways of the life misaligned with American values. The polarization of Americans' world-view leads to a state of never-ending conflict between their ideologies and other powers' such as the Soviet Union, in which neither party is willing to compromise, and each desires to forcibly impose their ways on the world. In this state of stubborn, nationalistic delusion, Americans to this day find themselves living dreams of nobility and absolute power in their perspectives of foreign affairs.