Americans conflate harmony with desirability in judging international relations

Evidence

“Good” relations are thought to be friendly, cooperative relations; “bad” relations are hostile, antagonistic relations. This usage conflates two very different dimensions: friendliness vs. hostility and desirability vs. undesirability. It reflects the peculiarly American assumption that harmony in international relations is always good and conflict always bad. The identification of good relations with friendly relations, however, is valid only if conflict is never desirable. Most Americans think it was “good” that the Bush administration made U.S. relations with Iraq “bad” by going to war over Kuwait. To avoid the confusion over whether “good” means desirable or harmonious and “bad” undesirable or hostile, I will use “good” and “bad” only to mean desirable and undesirable. Interestingly if perplexingly, Americans endorse competition in American society between opinions, groups, parties, branches of government, businesses. Why Americans believe that conflict is good within their own society and yet bad between societies is a fascinating question which, to the best of my knowledge, no one has seriously studied. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 1357

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why Americans endorse intra-society competition but condemn inter-society conflict remains genuinely understudied — worth chasing as an open question.
• XREF: Connects to the reading on communication and culture — the American biases toward harmony and consensus echo themes in Carey.
• SEED: An essay on the double standard: competition praised inside a society, condemned between societies — a lens on hypocrisy in foreign-policy discourse.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting observation about conceptual framing: the collapse of two axes (friendliness and desirability) into one moral judgment colors all American foreign-policy reasoning.