Either One Size Fits All, Or Size Doesn’t Matter

No more Mr. Nice Guy. Over at Asia Times Online this morning, I devoted my “Spengler” essay to the “idiot twins of American idealism.”

Former president George W Bush thought that the United States could turn Kabul into Peoria, the archetypal American city in the state of Illinois. President Barack Obama thinks that Kabul is just as good as Peoria. America has shed idealist delusion – that imposing the outward form of democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan would implant its content – in favor of an even stranger delusion, which refuses “to elevate one nation or group of people over another”, as Obama told the United Nations on September 23.

It was mad to believe that America could remake the world in its own image. Given that more than half the world’s languages will go extinct for lack of interest during the present century, it is even madder to turn foreign policy into an affirmative action program for disadvantaged cultures.

But those are the idiot twins of American idealism: either one size fits all, or size doesn’t matter.

Included amidst the one-liners are a few suggestions for a “realist” foreign policy.