The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.
Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth.
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.
But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.