Dave,

Excellent add. The US used to promote self-determination and take the position that we had no right to levy moral judgments onto others, and certainly no duty to intervene in small conflicts where we had little direct stake at risk.

Then came our emergence to the top of the heap following WWII, and our series of policy and prinicple compromises made over the course of the Cold War; our belief that those compromises and our efforts "won" the Cold War; to where we are today.

A country that has been too quick to apply military force, a country that has become so convinced of its "rightness" that we proclaim our values to be "universal" and call for a "new world order" under US leadership in our National Security Strategy. We push for Democracy as we see it and presume ourselves to have a "responsibility to protect" popualces seeking to sort out their own futures in far away lands. Until we turn and look back to where we came from, we will never realize how far we have drifted.

Said another way, we have grown up and become our parents; and frankly, we were not much pleased with them when they acted in this same way....