History Resumes: Sectarianism’s Unlearned Lessons
"But the calls for an intervention in Syria, where even supporters of toppling the Assad regime cannot credibly deny the sectarian reality of politics there, suggest that we not only have learned nothing from the interventions of the past twenty years, but that in fact we are incapable of learning anything, and, instead, are condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, rationalizing our failures by extolling our good intentions and brandishing our consciences like cudgels. But perhaps this should not surprise us. After all, we live in a time in which the United States, the largest debtor nation in the history of the world, crafts its foreign policy as if it were still the great creditor nation it was a generation ago, and bases much of its foreign policy on ambitious programs of human rights campaigning and democracy “promotion” that might have made sense at the zenith of the Enlightenment but which have little chance of working in the Enlightenment’s aftermath. But while all this reassuring and self-flattering dreaming goes on, a rising tide of authoritarian illiberal capitalism from northeast Asia, and of sectarianism in what for lack of a better word we rather over-optimistically call the developing world, and—who knows?—perhaps in Western Europe too, if things continue on their present course, intrudes like a civilizational memento mori."
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