Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order (2019)

Re:Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Internati... by zozbot234 on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:42AM (#29838981)

> The spread of democracy has caused a great deal of chaos as well documented by Amy Chua in her book World on Fire.

No surprise there actually. Sensible people have always been aware that liberal/bourgeois values and Constitutional protection of fundamental rights are basic prerequisites for meaningful democracy, as practiced throughout the West. Elections alone are practically irrelevant if these more basic things are missing.

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Re:Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Internati... by everybodyknows on Friday January 07, 2022 @10:22AM (#29840133)

> Sensible people have always been aware ...

Indeed. And yet it seems sensible people are quite impotent whenever there's such trouble, real or imagined, in some far-away land that a US Administration feels an uncontrollable urge to send in the Marines first, and try to "nation-build" afterward. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq -- we just never learn.

George Orwell: "Not much is learned from the lessons of history. And that is the greatest of the lessons of history."

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Re:Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Internati... by zozbot234 on Friday January 07, 2022 @10:37AM (#29840330)

> try to "nation-build" afterward.

This hasn't happened, though. True nation-building has not been seriously attempted since post-WWII Germany and Japan. Cargo-cult efforts to "export" the figments of electoral democracy (as seen in Afghanistan and 2000s Iraq) do not matter. They were always doomed to failure.

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