Read full text: https://www.unz.com/article/deaf-and-blind-the-maladies-of-american-diplomats/
There is something brilliant, in a certain way almost miraculous, in the deep, personal transformation implicit in those observations. Kennedy was telling us he learned while in the embassy a lesson I have long considered the most fundamental that our time requires of us but one too few of us even attempt: This is the capacity to see from the perspectives of others by way of seeing them with clear eyes and hearing them with open ears......
...When it comes to foreign affairs, the last thing in the world an American is willing to do is to think or to try to think what it would be like to be a Soviet, to be an Arab, to be an Iranian, to be an Indian. And the result is that we think of the world as a projection of ourselves, and we think that others must be thinking along the lines we’re thinking. And when they don’t, we’re troubled by it.
This is luminous thinking. Kennedy did not limit his concerns to this or that mistaken policy—we got it wrong in Lebanon, in Angola, or wherever the world over. I value him in part because he took on the psychological deformations that have so much to do with what has made American foreign policy a rolling disaster since the 1945 victories and Washington’s pursuit of “global leadership,” that polite term for aggressive hegemony.