The ideological conflicts of the twentieth century have faded. In this book, we find no need to deconstruct competing ideologies. Instead, certain habitual attitudes of our nation – embedded in our public culture (hodgepodge of political beliefs and nonpolitical wishful thinking) – now exercise an influence more powerful than the strongest of the ideologies of the past. The public culture is stronger because there is less opposition to it than there would be to a monolithic ideology because wishful thinking is continually reinforced by all elements of society – political, intellectual, and media. Its hold on our minds is stronger than ever was the hold of an ideology on our hearts. Hence, there is a compelling need to compare public culture to reality, and to point to the dangers of the illusions inherent in our public culture.

America will be confronted with a cascading sequence of military-diplomatic threats in the next four decades. Some are glimpsed by our leaders, but none are adequately understood because our leaders' perceptions are impaired by wishful thinking including a childish faith in the good intentions of others and in the world becoming more and more like America. In this book, we try to slice through this fog of illusion by using various technical economic tools and analytic instruments like deconstruction. The latter has often been a Marxist method of choice, focused on exposing the hidden agenda of the capitalist class. We harness deconstruction to a different purpose.