In the days of the British Empire the lines of communication were long and you couldn’t jump on a plane or send an electronic report to the government. The result was that the government had to delegate to people who lived in the colonies for years, knew the people, the politics and the language and could make informed decisions on the spot. I am not suggesting that decisions in those days were wise or good, but they were better than the present system, where so-called experts, who have never lived for years in, say, Pakistan, pontificate from comfortable offices in think-tanks. These people view everything through an American ideological perspective, know little history, and are unaware of the resentment and irritated amusement they cause.
Epicurus didn’t like empires and had good reasons not to. They usually over-reach themselves and are usually the cause of their own demise, through arrogance and ignorance. The softly, softly, cautious approach, while unappealing to the macho nationalists, is sensible if you find yourself running an empire.
An example is the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, which is supposed to strengthen the Anglo-American special relationship. Aside from the fact that this relationship is now moribund and no one believes in it any more, these people advocate macho policies in places like Afghanistan, which anyone with half a brain would have left severely alone to stew in its medievalism.
(But perhaps I am a victim of my own prejudice – anything with the name Margaret Thatcher in it is immediately suspect, as far as I am concerned. Much of what is wrong in the West dates from her time and her influence. Discuss)
What empires have ever BEGUN with a ” softly, softly, cautious approach?” They are born with violence and it’s hard to re-program the outlook of either the imperialists or the subjects.
Talking heads and spokesmen for the military-industrial complex wax indignant about the perceived decline in worldwide respect for the United States, which they blame on President Obama. And yet there is no grassroots anger about the restrained Obama foreign policy.
Why could this be? Patrick Buchanan puts it down to the perception by the public that Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan etc are not vital to the interests of the United States. Actually, the public has lost its trust of the neocons and other nationalist empire builders to actually win anything, whether it is Vietnam, Korea, Iraq or Afghanistan. Thousands are dead and trillions have been spent, and still the advocates of the American imperium want more. The public is saying “no”. After all that effort we are left with a re-emergence of nationalism, tribalism and raw Islamism. Buchanan ends his article with the words, “The American imperium, the last of the great Western empires, may be about to come down with the suddenness of the other empires of the 20th century”. Well, yes! Are you surprised?
(The article referred to was called “The End of Ideology?” by Patrick J. Buchanan)