America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas.
It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.
We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.
Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so.