nin.’s Reviews > American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters > Status Update

“When historical time has ceased to develop qualitatively on the inside and only pertains, as a series of stages, to the outside, it follows, critically, that outside opposition is irrational, if not downright criminal, while political quarrels on the inside can only take the form of an appeal to the principles and promise of the timeless, universal truth of the Origin.” … 1/5

“Yet the very same axioms can result in quite the opposite stance: when the Calvinist trope is fused, as it easily was, with a vibrantly secular and republican ideology, conceived around a spatiotemporal opposition between the New and the Old World, there opens up the possibility of a kind of interventionism drastically to redo the outside, to purify and clear it so to speak.” …

“Arguments along these lines would seem to land me in the diffuse debate about American exceptionalism. However, I do not want to go through all the preliminaries and caveats necessary to say anything substantial in that context.“

y’all don’t get, it’s not clocking to you, not only he’s standing on business, he is so fucking funny

“Ideologically, the US way of being toward the world has been at once massively traditional and strikingly arbitrary. On the one hand there is the inclination to invoke master narratives about the nation’s place in world history; on the other there is the tendency to abrupt changes and arbitrary action in actual policy.” …

“The US attitude toward the European system of international relations had always been problematic: surface acceptance amid relative geopolitical seclusion, punctuated by erratic and limited participation. One reason for this variance was that the United States, far more than the Soviet Union, was (and is) a world empire.” …

“For what drives diplomatic history in the United States is political controversy. Without it, the field has no direction, no character, no shape or form, no vivacity. This central feature is ultimately grounded in the fact that any analysis of the relationship to the outside world puts into question the very identity of the United States as an entity and a project.” …