alt Hacker NewsIt increasingly feels like the US sees everyone as an enemy.
Is it just the government that feels this way, or do the general population of the US feel like everyone else on the planet is an enemy?
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The republican population and the foolish minded people who want to be centrists have led to this situation of democrats and republican politicians acting out this way. More than 50% hopefully don't feel that way. I don't
There's a substantial population of most countries who feel that everyone else on the planet is somehow inferior. Basic nationalism. One of the big achievements of the 20th century was reducing that so it might be below 50% in many places.
However, that's not the same as "enemy". That's a more confrontational level. It's that particular branch of the far right which has recently risen to prominence. Ironically, in a lot of different countries.
The general population doesn't even think about the rest of the world.
Ignorance is a Weapon.
Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)
A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.
When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.