“The nation is not a political fiction,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in his 1990 treatise, Haiti: State Against Nation, “it is a fiction in politics.” Politicians, revolutionaries, concerned citizens—we all spin…

“The nation is not a political fiction,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in his 1990 treatise, Haiti: State Against Nation, “it is a fiction in politics.” Politicians, revolutionaries, concerned citizens—we all spin yarns in our attempts to take control of the very real powers of state. One such predominant tale is the national interest, a conception of a country’s definitive aims that is held by some as easily—even rationally—determined. As international relations realist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote in a 1952 essay on the United States’ national interest, “Taken in isolation, the determination of its content in a concrete situation is relatively simple; for it encompasses the integrity of the nation’s territory, of its political institutions, and of its culture.” Territory, politics, culture: these are quite a lot of inputs for such a monolithic concept. Morgenthau himself saw problems in his formulation, admitting the national interest could be elusive in concept and susceptible to interpretations “such as limitless imperialism and narrow nationalism.” One thinks, for instance, of the Bush White House’s security strategy of unilateral and extrajudicial force, based, in their own telling, on a “union of our values and our national interests.” In Baffler no. 67, we survey then the ways in which the idea of the national interest creates what Trouillot calls “the bleak homogeneity” pushed by those fighting for the nation’s reins.