War and Myth XII

One huge American myth—that most of seem to believe with all of our being—is that we all have hundreds if not thousands of friends. (Check Face book.) Everybody’s a friend. If you met him once, last year, he’s a friend.
I very deliberately try to use the word “acquaintance”. I have very few friends. My neighbor and I have known and cooperated with each other for twenty years. We are just reaching the point where we might become actual friends.
But “everybody’s a “friend”—remains a fervently held myth among many, many Americans. It’s something they seem to NEED to believe. I remember substituting in one of the lower grades a few years ago. A little girl came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, “Susie says she does not like me!”
She obviously expected me to deal with Susie—make Susie like her. Most teachers would have pulled Susie aside and had a long, soulful discussion on the necessity of liking one another. I startled the little girl very much by saying something quite other.
“It is Susie’s democratic right not to like you. She doesn’t have to like anyone. You don’t have to like anyone. She may not hurt you. She may not say bad things about you or damage your property, but there is no reason why she must like you.”
She went back to her seat. (Fifteen minutes later she and Susie were chattering together like magpies.) She typifies much of what is and has been wrong with American foreign policy. We want to get our own way (completely understandable in a great power), and we go into paroxysms of self-recrimination if some nation says it doesn’t like us.
We view Britain’s Prime Minister Palmerston as a cynic because he made the sensible observation that “Great Powers have no friends, only interests”. But I doubt very much that he would have wept if “Susie” had told him she didn’t like him. He ran a very successful foreign policy.
It goes deep into the heart of American mythology to believe that we must be liked by everyone we meet—and that, ideally, we must like them.
Why?
This need to be liked reached the height of silliness in the last Presidential Election. We were actually judging our candidates on which one of them was better liked by the Susie’s of the world! Obama won a pot full of votes by appearing—as a CANDIDATE!!—with crowds of cheering Europeans. (Do they vote?)
(We saw what that was worth when he tried to move the Olympics to Chicago and when he tried to paste together an agreement in Copenhagen. His outreach to the Muslim world from Cairo didn’t amount to all that much, either. Susie has to respect—and even fear—you before she gets cooperative. Lord Palmerston understood that.)
A comedian has to worry whether audiences like him enough to laugh; a politician has to worry whether or not his constituents like him enough to keep him in office—but someone making foreign policy and deciding on peace and war should not have likeability as his highest priority.
As any salesman can tell you, once you’ve got the prospective buyer concerned over whether or not you like him—whether or not the buyer is concerned about the salesman’s good will and friendship, he’s GOT him. The poor chap can be manipulated by his own needs into buying almost anything. It’s an effective tool, playing on someone’s need to be liked.
Let’s let neither our friends nor our enemies play us like that. It’s nice if you do—it’s perfectly all right if you choose not to. We can live without Susie’s friendship when necessary. We don’t have, and we don’t need to have, a thousand friends. None of us do.