Politics & Power Quote by Neil Sheehan

Victory can be its own propaganda, and Sheehan is indicting the kind that settles into a nation’s bones. Calling World War II a "tremendous success story" isn’t triumphalism here; it’s a warning about narrative. Success becomes a template, then a superstition: the leadership "began to assume" the next war would bend to American identity rather than strategy, politics, or limits. The phrasing matters. "Simply because of who they were" reduces grand doctrine to ego. It’s not just arrogance; it’s institutionalized self-regard masquerading as realism.

The British comparison sharpens the blade. At the turn of the 19th century, Britain’s imperial confidence and naval dominance encouraged a sense of historical entitlement: rules of engagement, global order, even time itself seemed arranged for them. Sheehan suggests the U.S. post-1945 inherited a similar reflex: the belief that industrial power and moral self-image are transferrable weapons. That analogy also carries a threat embedded in hindsight. Empires that mistake momentum for destiny don’t usually collapse in a single dramatic loss; they erode through costly misreads, colonial quagmires, and a widening gap between myth and facts on the ground.

As a journalist who chronicled Vietnam and the machinery that rationalized it, Sheehan is pointing at a specifically American postwar pathology: confusing technological superiority and WWII’s clear moral geometry with the messy, nationalist, postcolonial conflicts that followed. The subtext is brutal: when leadership treats identity as strategy, it stops asking the only questions that matter - what is the political end state, and what will it cost to reach it?