Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion.
The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.
Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.
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.