Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Friedman

Friedman is doing what he does best: compressing a messy era into a neat, newspaper-ready moral arc, then daring you to argue with the vibe. "Lost our groove" is deliberately informal, almost pop-psych language for a geopolitical diagnosis. It softens the indictment while making it feel commonsensical: America was humming along, then got rattled, then started behaving differently. The phrase "knocked off our game" frames 9/11 not only as tragedy but as a performance disruption, a moment where the nation stopped playing to its supposed strengths.

The real lever is the export metaphor. Countries export goods, culture, ideology; Friedman turns national identity into a brand with a balance sheet. "Exported hope" invokes postwar soft power: the Marshall Plan, Hollywood optimism, the idea of upward mobility as an American product. "Exporting fear" is the inverse brand campaign: airport security theater, surveillance, preemptive war, the language of threats and terror baked into policy and media. He's not just critiquing Iraq or Guantanamo; he's describing a shift in the emotional commodity the U.S. circulates globally.

Subtext: fear is contagious and profitable. Once a superpower reorganizes itself around vulnerability, it starts needing enemies to justify the posture. The line also absolves and blames at once. 9/11 becomes the causal explanation, but the "business" phrasing implies choice, habit, even addiction. It's a lament dressed as a market analysis: America didn't only get hurt; it pivoted, and the pivot remade its story.