"American interests" are also defined, and continuously redefined, by competition among divergent interests and divergent perceptions of interest. That competition, and its rather ephemeral outcomes, are often baffling to Americans and utterly incomprehensible to non-Amercians, particularly those who are committed to a particular perception of interest and thus less able to see the possibility of competing interests.
I am not convinced that the origin of Muslim radicalism constitutes a civilization-defining issue. I agree that we don't know the answers to those questions, and I suspect that any effort to propose simple, generic, or universally applicable answers to those questions is going to come up.
Yes, and they'd be right.
It's hard to read much history without observing that prolific and repeatable patterns often do have complex causes. An analogous example might be the spread of communist/socialist revolutionary movements in much of the formerly colonized world in the post WW2 decades. That was certainly a prolific and repeatable pattern, but anyone familiar with any of the movements in question knows the causes in any given case were far from simple or consistent. There were of course consistent patterns on the broadest scale, but attempts to extrapolate universal answers or solutions have rarely been of much use. Attempt to define simple, generic, or universal causes for broad geopolitical events are often satisfying but rarely useful.
Much confusion arises when people, often people with widely divergent views, assume that their own understanding is correct and everyone else's is flawed.
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