IMO you can really see this on full display with the Iran war. As a culture, we really can't seem to understand that we're being beaten. No adversary, and certainly not some [$Muslim_Slur] is conceptualized as being able to actual fight us off. The national conception of the entire MENA region is "goatherders with AK 47s and sandals". The idea that Iran is a large, ancient, well-educated, ideologically motivated, industrially advanced civilization with no desire to assimilate into the American way of life is as inconceivable to the American body politic as plate tectonics would be to an Iron Age peasant.

I've certainly gotten that vibe from Americans from time to time, like America is the only country they ever think about, but also they just sort of assume that everyone else is also thinking about America as much as they do.

Westerners don't even think non-western people are real. They can't picture Chinese or Russian people being real human beings, they think they're all just brainwashed empty husks. My aunt once argued a photo of a Chinese woman was fake because she was smiling and "Chinese people don't do that."

100% true coming from an american my fellow americans are really uncritical and lack self awareness in the most basic sense

To be American is to be trapped in a death cult. Even if you get enough glimpses behind the lies to know the worldview fostered here is evil and bullshit, you still need to be able to convince the other death cultists that you buy into their lies lest they converge on you and eat you alive. This, unfortunately, requires still looking at the world through their myopic lens and, when one does this enough, they risk buying into the lies all over again; it is so, so much easier than sitting with the knowledge that you and every single person you know and love are flesh eating monsters who are just as complicit in the crimes of the empire as the ones pulling the trigger, and almost as complicit as those writing the checks.

what no theory of mind does to a mf

Oh yeah that is true

Because they think america is the most advanced culture and that other countries want to attain the american way both knowing and unknowingly. This is also why they got so mad at that asian american snow boarder that represented china in the winter olympics, they saw it as betrayal.

Oh yeah, it's the case.

This is 10000% true

Source: am yank

Most Americans don't even leave their hometowns much and live in insular community bubbles, let alone visit another country in their life.

My view is it’s because of the history of US immigration. Other countries exist, but only as genus, a historical detail about where people come from, but not as a living part of present reality. Modern day Germany or the Byzantine Empire, it’s all the same, just a dead fact in a textbook.