Focus on American power is an attempt to dominate the world and morph history into its favor, sustaining colonialism.

The American apocalyptic entity is less familiar to us. Even if its urges to power and domination seem historically recognizable, it nonetheless represents a new constellation of forces bound up with what I've come to think of as "superpower syndrome." By that term I mean a national mindset-put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group-that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations. The American superpower status derives from our emergence from World War II as uniquely powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower left standing at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims. That entitlement stems partly from historic claims to special democratic virtue, but has much to do with an embrace of technological power translated into military terms. That is, a superpower the world's only superpower-is entitled to dominate and control precisely because it is a superpower. The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as nothing else could have. Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no superpower can permit. Indeed, at the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpower's victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or even extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated worldflntegral to superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both lived with a godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the cosmos, along with a fear of being annihilated by the enemy power. Now America alone possesses that world-destroying capacity, and post-Soviet Russia no longer looms as a nuclear or superpower adversary. We have yet to grasp the full impact of this exclusive capacity to blow up anyone or everything, but its reverberations are never absent in any part of the world. The confrontation between Islamist and American versions of planetary excess has unfortunately tended to define a world in which the vast majority of people embrace neither. But apocalyptic excess needs no majority to dominate a landscape. All the more so when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American leaders seem to act in concert. That is, each, in its excess, nurtures the apocalypticism of the other, resulting in a malignant synergy. As a psychiatrist concerned with history, I have in my past work explored the destructive excesses of our times-Nazi genocide, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chinese Communist "thought reform," the Vietnam war, and the apocalyptic forays of Aum Shinrikyo and other cults of the late-twentieth century. Each of these expressed a powerful impulse to destroy the existing world so that it might be purified and renewed. The Nazis had a vision of renewing the world biologically by ridding it of "defiling" races and bad genes~n dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, the United States sought not only to end a bloody war but also to display its awesome power and so to alter and reshape the postwar world to come( Chinese thought reform aimed at rooting out bad thoughts and ill-formed minds associated with an old and corrupt regime and way of life in order to purify, politically and ethically, a vast society. In Vietnam, villages, towns, and parts of cities had to be sacrificed and so destroyed in order to be "saved" from Communism. And Shoko Asahara, the guru who formed the Aum Shinrikyo cult, dedicated it to achieving a biblical Armageddon in order to bring on a world of spiritual perfection. /These extreme twentieth-century dreams and expressions of totalistic control and mass killing were bound to reverberate in the twenty-first century. (On September 11, 2001, some of those reverberations became all too cruelly evident. My past work suddenly became current. Indeed, my last book of the twentieth century had been entitled Destroying the World to Save It.)