Americans were very hostile to Britain until the 20th century, till the World War I period, because that was the empire, and we were consciously anti-imperial. John Quincy Adams has a great speech that he made on July 4, 1819, in which he says we don’t go forth in search of foreign monsters to destroy. He says we might become dictators for the world, but we would lose our own spirit as a nation. And that’s what we think has happened, the United States in some ways has lost its soul as a nation. We started to lose that soul in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lost it during the 1950s with Eisenhower going from 1,000 nuclear weapons when he takes office to 23,000 when he leaves office, to 30,000 when his budgeting cycle is finished. We lost it in Vietnam. We’ve lost it repeatedly, but we think it’s not all gone. That’s why we’re fighting to salvage what we can and turn this around. (Source)
I think that's right, and I've argued before that we may have won the war because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in winning it that way we lost our souls. You can make all the utilitarian arguments you'd like about how it shortened the war, and the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden was worse, but dropping the atomic bomb changed us, it fueled our paranoia, and we haven't recovered. Kuznick is optimistic that we can recover. I want to believe he's right, and I have sanguine moments when I do think we can recover. But it starts with our refusal of empire, and with our assuming a more modest role in the world as one nation among others.
Ever wonder why so many right wingers are so bent out of shape about the so-called illegal immigrant problem? Many right-wing Americans, especially those who identify with the frontiersman narrative, fear that the Mexicans, from whom 19th-Century Americans stole Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, are looking for payback, and that the invasion of the the southwest by undocumented Mexicans is a stealth strategy by Mexicans to take back what was stolen from them. So put up that ridiculous wall. At a deep, unconscious level that same mentality assumes that the world wants payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ever wonder why the U.S. feels the need to have a military budget that exceeds the the military budget of the rest of the world combined? Ever wonder why we're so afraid that we feel compelled to arm ourselves to the teeth? Sure it's economically driven; it makes a lot of important people rich. But there are other, deeper reasons. I'd argue that a big part of it is because we are the only country that has used atomic weapons on civilians to such destructive effect, and deep in our psyche, especially if we already have the paranoid tendencies typical of the hard right, we expect payback.
9/11 wasn't a surprise or an aberration for people with this mindset. It was to be expected, because what goes around comes around, and it proves that we will be destroyed by those who hate us as soon as we show the least weakness. So now we must be frisked at airports, and we must arm ourselves to unprecedent levels, and we must garrison the world. Not because the world hates our freedom, but because we are bullies and we know that all the people we've pushed around over the last sixty years are going sooner or later to push back. At root it's not an offensive strategy, but one one saturated in fear about payback.