He who tries to change the world, from a position in power, will always have the barking of the underdogs.

Its easy beeing a underdog, you dont have to provide analysis or better solutions, you dont have to proof that you are not delusional, that those you represent are good (lots of evil ex-empires among todays underdogs), all you have to do is bark and bite.

Even if you have a "dessert-mumified" culture like in the middle east, that has adapted to survival in a manmade dessert, without risky progress, you are somehow expected to fix the whole physical planet.

Even landing a western spaceship, proofing things can thrive in the dessert, will not change what people have internalized over the centuries. Rather the local culture rubs off on the spaceship and it begins to rust into the same empire scrap yard.

Things proofen not to work:

* military interventions

* secret service interventions

* cultural nudging (soft power)

* brute force take-overs (colonialism)

you could have just written "white powa unh unh" instead of this wall of text

~ And you could have written a well thought out rebuttal instead of your one liner. At least the g.p spent some time on their thoughts. Have a down vote on me.

WW1 and 2 are pretty solid examples where military interventions have worked out just fine.

Both of these were before nuclear weapons were a thing, though.

WWI didn't work very well.

See: WWII

From an american perspective where they stayed in the back during WW1 and had to be trained on the spot, and were perfectly happy to work with nazi germany in WW2 until shit hit the fan, sure.

For most of europe, it's a traumatic experience that led to dozens of millions of dead young adults, entire cities firebombed and razed to the ground, areas shelled so hard that even today their access is forbidden.

But I'm sure it's much easier from a position of a country that never had a single war on its territory.

That’s maybe a misunderstanding. I’m not advocating war per se. Yet I think it was right that the US didn’t stay on the sidelines.

I'm struggling to think of ways in which WWI 'worked out just fine' unless you count getting rid of the Romanovs and (most of) the Hapsburgs.

It helped to exaust alot of old colonial empires close to collapse, were the memberstates escaped to independence. Those two worldwars were what ate the british empire alive.

Good point. Yet not all of them if you consider Russia the last of the European colonial empires.

I certainly do not. (Look at France and Britain's overseas holdings)

Largely agree I think, except soft power. I think soft power is exactly what is happening in Iran. People in Iran has been living a "private" life for a long time with access to information, a "public" life which goes on as usual. Something has to give.