Ken,
I actually agree with most of your responses, and I'm not sure when that personal transition took place. It started when I wondered I why I was in countries in helping dictators strengthen their militaries to oppress their own people in the name of fighting communism to free the oppressed. I joined the military, specifically Special Forces to fight communism, to save the world from this evil ideology and I really believed in the cause. I still believe in the anti-communist crusade, but in hindsight realize we made some stupid deals with the devil to achieve a temporary strategic advantage over the communists. There is no doubt in my mind that communism was evil, it resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed socieities and economies, etc., but shouldn't have given us license to be stupid. In some regards we lost our moral compass during the Cold War.
Fast shift forward to the 90s when we no longer had a boogy man to fight, we shifted to what some called global reconstruction efforts post Cold War, where we focused on peace operations, fighting the drug trade, still fighting terrorism (it wasn't new in the 90s, and it sure as hell wasn't new on 9/11), humanitarian assistance etc. We pushed multinational operations, trying to get other nations to "share" the burden of reconstruction. We enabled regional responses to security challenges, most which of course were largely funded by and led by the U.S.. I think our intentions for the most part were good, but were they really in the national interest? The people shaping popular thinking in the beltway then were pushing the importance of globalism, the End of History, integrating the disconnected economies (read developing world) into the larger global economic system, etc. It was very much about aggressive meddling diplomacy backed by military action.
9/11 gave reason to some of the opinion shapers to (such as CNAS) to accelerate our meddling, while others (more level headed in my view) wanted to limit GWOT to finding and killing terrorists that were a threat to us (not the rest of the world), not reforming global society in hopes of some permanet cure for terrorism by addressing underlying issues. We were naive enough to call this Smart Power, though little has changed. Sadly little of what we're doing can actually be tied to national defense (outside of the CIA and Special Operations), but instead it can be tied to supporting the idealism of a few (such as the great minds in CNAS) who promote that it is "our" responsibility to meddle and transform these poor countries, to fix their economies, to transform their incorrect political views, etc. Eventually they'll catch on that these are hostile acts and we're actually developing tomorrow's enemies who actually will be a threat to our Nation.
I'm actually beginning to think as a nation we have going collectively mad, and that this budget crisis may actually save us from ourselves in the long run. I'm still an idealist in many respects, but have learned the importance of moderation, listening to those who we want to help (who may not want the help we want to push on them), and the importance of keeping real threats to our nation as top priority, which doesn't mean during on the lights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That is a great job for the UN, State Department and USAID.
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