" The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick. "

― John Lewis Gaddis , George F. Kennan: An American Life