Interventionism and 'democratization' have been linchpins of the Anglo-American allied foreign policy for nearly a century as we approach the centennial of the regrettable "Great War."
Making the world safe for democracy was a noble goal, but it has proven to be a most illusive one indeed.
We suffer to this day from the victorious allies' inability to hold the French in check from exacting vengeance from the Germans at Versailles and from the inability of the Americans to extract colonial concessions from the European powers.
Maps were redrawn creating 'nations' that were bound by nothing other than geography or colonial interests such as the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, modern Syria and the the entire mess in Palestine and the 'British Mandate.'
So a century later we reap what the liberal bourgeois intelligentsia sowed. (Classical liberals, not the American political version.) In agreement with the Marxists on one point - that is that religion and culture would fade into the dustbins of history as economic equality and education 'elevated' the masses - both great political ideologies in the West made the worst miscalculation of the past eight hundred years regarding Islam, nationalism and zealotry.
Far from fading, the anger has built up over the past century to the point that the genie, which Stalin and other strong armed thugs (like Saddam Hussein and the Syrians effectively bottled up for nearly seven decades) is now out of the bottle and extracting a most painful revenge.
In America many of us, myself included, spoke ill about the 'neo-cons' under Bush, yet the reality of foreign policy under the Democrats is that the differences which seem so vast to myopic Americans are unfathomable to people in the rest of the world - be they our friends or our enemies. The basic tenets of our policy have been, for the most part remain, the direct descendent of Wilsonian ideals, which while noble in themselves, have proven to be to be impossible to attain.
Of course, since our leaders believe that standardized testing and STEM in education (science, technology, engineering and math) are the keys to our future, no one here learns history, sociology,philosophy, foreign languages etc....
Sadly, there is little which is new under the sun, and those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat its errors.
God help us all.
