Politics & Power Quote by Edwidge Danticat

The line lands like a cool glass of water on the fever of American self-mythology: the fantasy that U.S. power is basically benevolent, that alliances are just friendship with flags. Danticat, a novelist attuned to how private lives get mangled by public forces, borrows a hard-edged maxim of statecraft and then sharpens it with repetition: "you see that over and over". It is less a revelation than an accusation of pattern recognition, a nudge to stop treating each betrayal as an exception.

Her intent is to puncture sentimentality in how Americans talk about foreign policy. "Someone has said" is a strategic sidestep - she frames the idea as common wisdom, not a spicy personal take, which makes the critique harder to dismiss as ideological. The phrase "nations have interests" compresses a whole apparatus (trade, military basing, migration control, optics) into a single, chilling noun. The second clause, "they don't have friends", is blunt by design; it denies the comfort of moral narrative.

The subtext, especially coming from a Haitian-born writer, is that communities on the receiving end of U.S. decisions have long been asked to mistake proximity for protection. The U.S. offers partnership, aid, even rhetoric of shared values, but the relationship is conditional: useful today, expendable tomorrow. In that light, her sentence reads like a survival tool - a reminder that empathy lives in people, not in institutions, and that policy should be read like a contract, not a love letter.