Unfinished Business, Then and Now
by J. R. Nyquist
In its foreign policy the United States seldom finishes what it starts. Because American foreign policy is at the mercy of domestic policy, and the business of America is business, it would be silly to take the government’s stated foreign policy seriously. In my 1999 book, Origins of the Fourth World War, I wrote: “America does not like war. America does not trust the principle of unified and definitive authority that goes hand in hand with militarism. It likes comfort and well-being. It prefers that capitalist thing – that phrase in the Declaration of Independence – ‘the pursuit of happiness.’” Instead of taking us down a militarist path, recent statistics now suggest that the pursuit of happiness (as conceived under a culture of narcissism) leads to national neurosis, the mass marketing of anti-depressants, widespread self-medication, and a declining birthrate. The advent of Generation Me, as defined by psychologist Jean M. Twenge, has entailed the decline of social rules as well as the rise of unrealistic expectations followed by rising anxiety and depression. Appetites whetted by slick media advertisements together with fallout from the self-esteem movement has brought us to the absurdity of an American generation that is, in the words of Twenge, “more confident, assertive, entitled – and more miserable than ever before.” America cannot have an effective or consistent foreign policy under any president, because the narcissistic self-misconception of the country negates any and all long-range future considerations.




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