If those who are in command of a state are unconcerned with the national interest (that of the welfare of that country's people), does that nation truly exist? I think not.
But, if it is beneath consideration to those who could most benefit from it, what characteristics make it so irrelevant? I leave it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
America doesn't exist. It is a vulgar fiction for the ignorant masses to believe in. Patriotism in America is pseudo-religious, because patriotism simply means loyalty to one's geographically defined nation-state, but American patriotism is a bizarre loyalty to ideas of democracy promotion, exceptionalim, and noble visions that aren't to any degree reflected in American foreign policy except rhetorically.
Nation-states are basically irrelevant. There are groups of commercial interests in various nations whose boards of directors, lawyers, and government officials are all in interlocking directorates designed to put them in positions to use the laws to subsidize private profits with public funds. This isn't as conspiratorial as notions about Jewish bankers running the world (which seem absurd to me), these institutions aren't global monoliths, but this framework is hyperpluralistic, with wealthy elites pursuing their various interests through legal chicanery.
After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970’s, the world’s managed floating exchange rate system emerged. Along with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system came the emergence of the WTO as an entity designed to reduce capital controls and restrictions that it calls "trade barriers." This means that governments, through central banking systems like the Federal Reserve, can no longer control their nation's economic stability. Private investors are free to trade currency like any other equity, and they can also monopolize the securities through free market trading.
This gives them to power to basically destroy a nation's economy by devaluing its currency and creating depression or hyperinflation, depending on how the Treasury would repond. So their prerogatives, and those of the corporations they represent, will dominate the public agenda. They have to or they will basically obliterate the nation economically through capital flight. So, private enterprises are the only entity that are salient in the world economy, and they have essentially absolute hegemony. People are voluntarily compliant in part because they don't realize that the national interest doesn't exist, only the interest of certain corporations.
The destruction of America is essentially irrelevant, so long as Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobile, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble and so forth are making profit, that is all that matters. If you don't believe me, look at our trade policies with China.
The mainland central government of China maintains a great deal of potential liquidity, exercises rigorous currency controls, and strictly pegs its currency to the dollar. As a result of this, the Chinese have been accused of undervaluing their currency in order to make Chinese exports cheaper and more desirable (Hill, Charles W.L., Global Business Today, 2006: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 340-341). This has led to a nearly $90 billion trade deficit with China. The Chinese central bank maintains less authoritarian control of Hong Kong. As a result, Hong Kong’s exchange rates are more a product of the forces of supply and demand in the currency market (i.e. the actions of private investors).
Hong Kong is a part of this quasi-floating exchange rate system. The Hong Kong dollar, with a US dollar price of about 13 cents, is actually pegged to the US dollar’s movement against a number of other commonly traded currencies, with price fluctuations that are the result of private transactions. This arrangement affects the "price competitiveness of US exports" while China’s forced devaluation of the Yuan affects the price competitiveness of US imports, giving the Chinese powerful leverage over the US in terms of trade policy (http://www.state.gov/www/issues/economic/trade_reports/eastasia96/hongkong96.html). This arrangement could potentially operate as a new kind of barrier to free trade: the currency exchange hegemony.
What happens when a nation's trade deficit gets to high (ours is over $3.5 trillion and growing at a rate of $.5 trillion a year)? Well, eventually that nation's reserves are depleted and it goes into an economic depression. But, that doesn't matter, because the Chinese exports are just products of American corporations manufactured in China. So even if the Chinese win the nation-state trading game and our economy is sunk, the American corporations are still winning.
But what will the wealthy do when the national economy is destroyed? Well, private wealth is like matter and energy; it is never truly destroyed, merely transferred. Take the Depression of the 1930s, the wealth wasn’t gone, simply highly concentrated into the assets of a wealthy elite group. That's when Keynesian economics was employed to quickly placate the people and make them believe the government was there to help them. This is because if the people learned the truth, they would eat the rich who ran their government rather than stare themselves.
American patriotism is a blind, ignorant loyalty to dominant, elite groups of wealthy private citizens who are controlling the nation's finances through private trading. Maybe patriots are ignorant, afraid, or perhaps they are suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome. But I for one don't understand loyalty to wealthy tyrants who are the "masters of the world" and of our destiny.