America has neither the students nor the teachers to fix its problems overseas. There are a few sages still left, notably Angelo Codevilla, who holds up the example of John Quincy Adams against the utopian obsessions of the major schools of foreign policy thinking.
On the left, we have the likes of Obama’s so-called national security team, including human-rights dabblers like Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes. On the right we have the neoconservatives, who believe that Being Determines Consciousness (democratic institutions will make people into democrats), and Catholic natural law theory, which boils down to the assertion that unaided human reason will lead everyone to the Western idea of individual liberty and democratic governance.
I share Goldman's belief that Iran was the key to addressing the problems in the Middle East, that taking out Saddam and using Iraq as a temporary base to destroy Iran made sense, but that what we ended up doing was both completely unrealistic and worse than doing nothing in the long run.
Thanks for the link, Mush. I like Spengler's work. Realistically pessimistic.
ReplyDeleteTo tie in from a Fungle Jungle post of yours, my left eye agrees with Spengler's worldview. My right eye sees that the transformation to a better world will happen internally, one saved soul at a time.
Right. There's no political recovery from the mess we've made. But hearts change, and we'll build a better nation from better people.
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