Article written by a Lebanese Journalist – Ahmed Husseini
The Empire of Dissonance: America’s Moral Contradictions
Cognitive
dissonance—the tension between belief and behavior—has never been
merely an individual ailment. It is also the psychology of empires,
especially the United States, once confident in its moral self-image as
the world’s democratic beacon, now living in profound contradiction:
proclaiming liberty and underwriting occupation, invoking human rights
after arming those who erase them, speaking of peace when enabling
perpetual war. No event has revealed this more starkly than Gaza.
For
nearly two years, the United States has lamented a humanitarian
catastrophe that its own weapons sustain. It calls for restraint as it
resupplies the arsenals of devastation. It speaks of a “rules-based
international order” on Ukraine even as it defends exceptions—on Gaza
and Lebanon—that render those rules meaningless. The distance between
America’s ideals and its conduct is no longer cosmetic; it is
structural. What was once moral confidence has become moral confusion—a
condition of hypocrisy and self-delusion. America no longer reconciles
its contradictions; it rationalizes them.
Since
1945, the United States has fused two incompatible ambitions: to act as
global hegemon and moral exemplar. Its exceptionalism promised to
transform power into virtue, intervention into deliverance. That
illusion held until contradiction overwhelmed it. Vietnam shattered it.
Iraq and Afghanistan buried it. Gaza may make it irreversible. Each war
demanded a story to reconcile brutality with benevolence: “spreading
democracy,” “fighting terror,” “defending Israel.” Each was a
psychological device that preserved self-esteem while violating
professed values—the need to remain righteous while being ruthless, to
believe that violence could be humanitarian and moral purity survive
moral compromise.
Gaza
has pushed this logic to collapse. The United States insists that
Israel has the right to defend itself but denies Palestinians the right
to survive. It condemns civilian deaths while vetoing UN cease-fire
resolutions. Every famine, every bombed hospital, requires a new
justification—“eliminate Hamas,” “no democracy can tolerate terror at
its borders.” These are not lies so much as self-absolutions. To admit
Gaza’s full moral consequence would be to confront the dissonance
between America’s image as arbiter of justice and its role as enabler of
mass death. Dissonance has become doctrine. The United States now
internalizes Israel’s impunity, making it an extension of its own.
The
tone of its diplomacy since October 2023 reflects that anxiety: every
statement of concern paired with a new weapons shipment, every appeal to
restraint followed by a veto. The nation that once disciplined others
through moral language now disciplines language itself to avoid moral
reckoning. Gaza thus reveals not only a geopolitical failure but a
psychological one—the inability to distinguish conviction from
convenience.
This
dissonance has deep roots. In Vietnam, Washington called mass
bombardment the defense of freedom. In Iraq, it called invasion
liberation. In Afghanistan, it invoked women’s rights while empowering
warlords and drone operators. Each failure was rebranded—a “mistake,” a
“miscalculation,” a “tragedy”—never the inevitable result of a moral
mission unmoored from moral restraint. Gaza and Lebanon mark the
culmination of that pattern, but with one difference: the world now
watches in real time, armed with cameras and conscience. The empire’s
selective empathy—whose lives are mourned, whose deaths explained
away—can no longer hide behind distance.
And
within the United States, a generational fracture is widening. Youth
across Democrats, Republicans, and especially Independents are
transforming Gaza’s moral crisis into a confrontation between old and
young, elite and underprivileged. Like Vietnam, this revolt grows not
from direct involvement but from exposure to its imagery. The trauma of
killing and starvation resonates as if America were again at war with
its own conscience.
The
persistence of this dissonance is not only political but psychological.
American exceptionalism functions as a national ego defense: by
imagining itself the custodian of universal values, the nation turns
self-interest into virtue. Its interventions become moral acts, its
alliances principles. The suffering produced by its power is recast as
the price of progress. “Democracy,” “human rights,” “security,” “Western
values”—these are now anesthetics for empire. The more catastrophic the
outcome, the more moral vocabulary must expand to contain it.
But
the mechanism is failing. Poll after poll shows a generational
reversal: for the first time, more Americans—especially the
young—sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. Lawmakers and
policy architects ignore this warning, clinging to the rhetoric of an
earlier moral order. Even populist figures on the right—Kirk, Carlson,
Kelly, Bannon—acknowledge the shift. The dissonance has ceased to be
external; it now corrodes from within.
At
home, the same fracture of conscience divides the body politic.
Americans denounce authoritarianism while yearning for strongmen, praise
freedom while tolerating surveillance and information monopolies. The
Gaza war has magnified these contradictions. University protests—once
signs of democratic vitality—are treated as threats to order. A
generation raised on diversity and rights watches its government
criminalize dissent in their name. The empire now punishes those who
mirror its truth.
Abroad,
moral incoherence breeds strategic collapse. The United States warns
against Russian aggression while excusing Israeli expansionism, calls
China a threat to rules it breaks for allies. Moral language has become
an instrument of power rather than its restraint. When ethics turn
selective, legitimacy dissolves. Allies grow doubtful, adversaries
emboldened. A superpower unable to admit error cannot command trust; its
words persuade no one.
The
liberal order built after 1945 rested on a myth—that power could be
moral, that hegemony could coexist with justice. Gaza has shattered that
myth. Washington’s defense of Israel’s impunity has alienated Europe,
estranged the Global South, and exposed the liberal project’s decay.
When 140 nations vote for Palestinian statehood and the United States
vetoes it, the rupture is not diplomatic but existential. The empire
still speaks, but its vocabulary has lost meaning.
Cognitive
dissonance can end in two ways: by altering belief or behavior. America
can either redefine its values to fit its actions—an admission of
cynicism—or realign its actions with its declared values, which would
require humility. Such humility would begin with Gaza: a cease-fire not
as gesture but as moral restoration, aid conditioned on respect for
human life, acknowledgment that security cannot rest on collective
punishment.
The
empire of dissonance cannot endure. Every justification of cruelty
corrodes its own foundations. Every denial of guilt deepens it.
Prolonged dissonance becomes delusion. America’s tragedy is to mistake
moral discomfort for depth and justification for integrity. Gaza is not
merely a humanitarian wound—it is a mirror held to the American psyche.
The reflection is painful but necessary. The empire must now choose
between power without principle and principle without power. Its
decision will define not only the fate of Palestine but the moral
direction of the century.