He had to invent himself anew, imagine himself into being. He had to will into existence a fictive drama into (370) which he could enter and live, imposing a redemptive order on the chaos of a meaningless universe without God. Then the God who had long been projected to the beyond could be born within the human soul. Then man could dance godlike in the eternal flux, free of all foundations and all bounds, beyond every metaphysical constraint. Truth was not something one proved or disproved; it was something one created. In Nietzsche, as in Romanticism generally, the philosopher became a poet: a world conception was judged not in terms of abstract rationality or factual verification, but as an expression of courage, beauty, and imaginative power. (371)
[8] So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint of international honor the argument is even stronger. The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago, left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove out a medieval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be the course of infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake.
A: The judgment you refer to was prompted by the irresponsible neutralism to which we were addicted after the First World War and which vaingloriously thought we would be preserved as a museum piece of pure democracy, while other nations were enslaved by Nazism. We emerged as one of the two superpowers after the Second World War. Our power had cured us of irresponsible neutralism, but not of self-righteousness. We now act as the self-appointed guardians of democracy against the Communist peril in all parts of the world. Hans Morgenthau defined our stance as "globalism" in your pages. The President's State of the Union address in which he proposed that a healthy and wealthy nation might erect a welfare-state paradise at home, and still pursue its saving police duties in Vietnam, thus proving true to the principle of national self-determination, had a touch of this vainglory.
Christian theology attributes three prime qualities to God the highest power, the greatest wisdom, the greatest goodness. In so far as you can you should make this trinity yours. Power without goodness is unmitigated tyranny; without wisdom it brings chaos, not domain.