Imperial Empathy

A friend recently pointed out this passage from this article in The New Yorker. The passage is about a soldier, John Prior, in Iraq recounted a recent search of an innocent man's house. In such a short passage, it really says so much about how some Americans think of their place in the world:

Recently, Prior had experienced what he called an epiphany. He and his soldiers were searching a man’s house on what turned out to be a false accusation. “And I just realized—we’re on top,” he said. “Rome fell, and Greece fell, and I thought, I like being an American. I like being on top, and you don’t stay on top unless there’s people willing to defend it.” It was a feeling not of triumph but of clarity—and a limited kind of empathy. “I thought, What if someone did this to my family? I’d be pissed. And what if I couldn’t do anything about it? And I thought, I don’t want this to happen to me or my family, and we need to maintain superiority as the No. 1 superpower.”