Agree with those who note that this is a brilliant analysis. Not stated in full is the US's history in Iran, which is one of repeated mistakes. The overthrow and murder of Mohammad Mosaddegh engineered by the CIA and the UK's MI6 led to the Shah, whose rule was counter productive. This led directly to the overthrow by the hard line theocrats that have turned Iran from a relatively progressive Middle East nation into a pariah. The current administration has escalated the level of mistakes to new heights.
Iran should have been our natural ally from the beginning. It’s a tragedy for the USA, and devastating for the people of Iran, that America’s decades of meddling (with some help from the British) helped stimulate decades of despotism.
The Iranian people are trapped by the same structural problem facing much of the world: there is no coherent, credible alternative to authoritarianism being offered in the mainstream. That’s why the Arab Spring failed, and it’s why the Iranian uprising is likely to fail as well.
Simply invoking “democracy” (a term people can't define today) and calling for elections is not a serious political program. It’s a slogan. Without politically literate and competent experts in this field, we either have chaos or return of authoritarian rule.
This isn’t just a Middle Eastern problem. It’s why what’s coming in the US over the next few years is likely to be unprecedented and genuinely frightening.
At root, we’re facing a massive crisis of expertise in politics. We no longer know how to govern complex societies due to a lack of familiarity with political philosophy.
We're running out of time to learn it. It’s much later than most people think.
We’ve taken Liberal Democracy for granted for decades, and this lack of attention to self explanation has caught up with us. Faced with a lot of complex problems, and a significant degree of stagnation, the Liberal Democratic Order doesn’t know how to justify itself, and it doesn’t have a universally compelling argument on why the alternatives are worse.
Churchill’s observation that democracy is “the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried,” neatly sums up the dilemma. Every people who have tried something else, eventually learn that it bites them in the ass.
I’m suddenly remembering the wisdom of Obama’s cause no harm approach to foreign policy.
The lesson of the original US-supported regime change in the 1950s, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that many countries are easy to break, and once you break them, you own them.
Agree with those who note that this is a brilliant analysis. Not stated in full is the US's history in Iran, which is one of repeated mistakes. The overthrow and murder of Mohammad Mosaddegh engineered by the CIA and the UK's MI6 led to the Shah, whose rule was counter productive. This led directly to the overthrow by the hard line theocrats that have turned Iran from a relatively progressive Middle East nation into a pariah. The current administration has escalated the level of mistakes to new heights.
Iran should have been our natural ally from the beginning. It’s a tragedy for the USA, and devastating for the people of Iran, that America’s decades of meddling (with some help from the British) helped stimulate decades of despotism.
The Iranian people are trapped by the same structural problem facing much of the world: there is no coherent, credible alternative to authoritarianism being offered in the mainstream. That’s why the Arab Spring failed, and it’s why the Iranian uprising is likely to fail as well.
Simply invoking “democracy” (a term people can't define today) and calling for elections is not a serious political program. It’s a slogan. Without politically literate and competent experts in this field, we either have chaos or return of authoritarian rule.
This isn’t just a Middle Eastern problem. It’s why what’s coming in the US over the next few years is likely to be unprecedented and genuinely frightening.
At root, we’re facing a massive crisis of expertise in politics. We no longer know how to govern complex societies due to a lack of familiarity with political philosophy.
We're running out of time to learn it. It’s much later than most people think.
We’ve taken Liberal Democracy for granted for decades, and this lack of attention to self explanation has caught up with us. Faced with a lot of complex problems, and a significant degree of stagnation, the Liberal Democratic Order doesn’t know how to justify itself, and it doesn’t have a universally compelling argument on why the alternatives are worse.
Churchill’s observation that democracy is “the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried,” neatly sums up the dilemma. Every people who have tried something else, eventually learn that it bites them in the ass.
Fake news.
If they had only known him as we know him.
I’m suddenly remembering the wisdom of Obama’s cause no harm approach to foreign policy.
The lesson of the original US-supported regime change in the 1950s, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that many countries are easy to break, and once you break them, you own them.