Posted on 03/27/2022 5:56:41 AM PDT by FarCenter
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After the attacks by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, America’s hubris manifested itself in an effort to spread democracy to the world, but in the first instances to Afghanistan and Iraq. ... The George W. Bush administration rightly responded to attacks on our country by hunting down the terrorists responsible and retaliating against some of the regimes that supported the terrorists. But then it got carried away and launched a Wilsonian crusade for democracy.
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As President Reagan's U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War. But Kirkpatrick was not blinded by hubris when the Berlin Wall fell. In the fall of 1990, she wrote an article in The National Interest suggesting that the United States should become a “normal country” in the post-Cold War world. She warned U.S. post-Cold War policymakers against pursuing a “mystical mission” that reached beyond the Constitutional requirement to protect the nation's vital national security interests. Specifically, she wrote that the United States should not devote itself to establishing democracy around the world. She derided the notion that the conduct of U.S. foreign policy should be "the special province" of elites who too often do not pay its costs or bear its consequences. Such elites, Kirkpatrick warned, often develop "disinterested globalist" attitudes couched in high-minded terms such as "internationalism" instead of focusing on concrete U.S. national security interests.
This did not mean that the United States shouldn’t encourage the growth of democratic institutions where prudently possible, but Kirkpatrick expressly warned that “it is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world.” Instead, the United States, she wrote, should be a normal country--“an independent nation in a world of independent nations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at realcleardefense.com ...
That Axis of Evil should include North Korea.
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