In a sense my learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about America’s role in the world; I was also slowly understanding my own psychology and temperament and prejudices—the very things that had made it so impossible to acquire worldly knowledge in the first place. American exceptionalism did not only define the United States as a special nation among lesser nations, it demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were born superior to others, a concept of goodness that requires the existence of evil for its own sustenance. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice, and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.
Yet we are living at a time when people are questioning—trying to question—their national identities in new ways. After the death of Margaret Thatcher, the actor Russell Brand (during his more serious years) published an essay about once catching a glimpse of the elderly Thatcher in some gardens along London’s Strand. For Brand, as a young boy, Thatcher was the “headmistress of our country,” the woman who taught her children that “there is no such thing as society” and that they should “ignore the suffering of others.” Brand then did what in retrospect was the logical next step for a child of Thatcher: he considered her effect on his own mind. “What is more troubling,” he writes, “is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins.” Part of the reason Brand felt compelled to question the Thatcher way of life was that so much of her economic philosophy had been recently upended by the financial crisis. But the remarkable thing was that the effect of the crisis on Brand’s country had actually compelled him to question himself. He was not immune; he was not innocent, either.
Americans have in recent years been stumbling through the twilight of the American century, but largely without Brand’s self-knowledge. Historians and pundits struggle to explain disturbing phenomena: Donald Trump, a flailing foreign policy, the rise of inequality, daily shootings, the tragic plea “Black lives matter.” Incipient decline might account for the collective anxiety gripping the country, the fears and rages, what is, in the end, a desperate confusion. For the first time since World War II, the lives of American citizens, who have long been self-sufficient and individualistic—the masters of their own fates—have become entwined with the fate of their nation in a palpable way. It is also perhaps the first time Americans are confronting a powerlessness that the rest of the world has always felt, not only within their own borders but as pawns in a larger international game. Globalization, it turns out, has not meant the Americanization of the world; it has made Americans, in some ways, more like everyone else.
In academia, there has been a call to internationalize history or, in the words of the historian Erez Manela, “to examine how the United States has been reflected in the world, in the histories of other societies,” which suggests that entire nations—billions of lives—cannot be studied without considering the intervening history of the United States. A profound moral event has taken place, something bigger than what is cheerily reduced to McDonald’s signs in Shanghai, or disparaged as mere anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.
Yet just as black American writers once desperately urged their white friends to come to terms with their violent but intimate relationship, foreigners have been constantly asking Americans to listen to them. The Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid and the American author Jay McInerney gave a talk in New York in 2012. During the question-and-answer period, an audience member joked that the best solution to the anti-American protests in Pakistan would be to give them all green cards to the United States. The audience member was very proud of this punch line. Of course, most Americans believe that everyone in the world wants to live in the United States. These were the sorts of things that seemed like obvious, factual truths to Americans. But then Hamid pointed out something that would be an obvious, factual truth to a Pakistani. He said: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States … There are kind of two Americas.”
I kept encountering this idea of the two Americas. The Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie once wrote that the case of John Hersey’s Hiroshima epitomized this divided existence. For Shamsie, there was one America, “which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory,” as well as another America, the one of John Hersey, “the America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is.” Shamsie wanted to know, however, where were all the John Herseys of today, the American writers or novelists making sense out of, say, the war on terror, the dirty wars in Latin America, or the oil-and-weapons obligations of the Middle East? She couldn’t find many young novelists who even acknowledged American power in the world. Shamsie recounted an experience that I have heard time and time again from foreign friends: “I was startled to discover that when I said I was from Pakistan I was met with blankness—as if, in 1991, no one knew that through the 1980s Pakistan had been America’s closest ally in its proxy war against the Soviets.”