Every country has its own “national style” in the way it understands and interacts with the world, the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann wrote in 1968. Hoffmann, a Harvard professor who had been raised and educated in France, explored the United States’ singular style in an essay in Foreign Affairs, probing the American psyche and considering how the nation’s sense of itself informed its approach to foreign policy.
Among Hoffmann’s observations was that Americans viewed the past with complacency. Because their history had largely been a “success story,” he wrote, they tended to believe that their values were “of universal application.” Europeans, on the other hand, had weathered centuries of “ups and downs,” and were therefore skeptical about “applying recipes, abroad or even at home, that worked once in a particular circumstance.”
Americans, ever optimistic and solution-oriented, saw foreign policy as a way “to deter and avert occasional nuisances that might slow down the march” toward progress, Hoffmann argued. And they were prone to taking any sort of loss particularly hard. “A people that has never experienced defeat will be more likely to view the very possibility of even localized defeats as a catastrophe,” Hoffmann wrote. And when events do not fulfill their high expectations, “Americans tend to blame the world.”
|
