U.S. Foreign Policy

Although the notion of national character has turned out to be of dubious validity, the notion of a national style holds greater promise. It is a postulate and a construct. It attempts to establish order in a chaotic mass of features by positing that a nation perceives the world, and its place in it, in a fashion which is never quite that of any other nation, just as no individual ever faces the world as anyone else does. This way is a procedure of selection, and therefore inevitably one of exclusion, and it is a procedure of distortion, because things that may be important are left out and also because the things selected are refracted through the prism of the nation’s or individual’s character.