A bit intellectually stilted, but worth the read. If you keep up with this blog you have read it all here in my own tech-weenie autodidactic intellectual wannabe prose -- these guys are the real deal.
Some priming before you begin ...
"Westphalian" -- Peace of Westphalia, 1648. The end of the 30 years war, the agreement between Rome and the European States to recognize and respect the state as the source of government. Could look at it as the REAL end of "The Holy Roman Empire" and the rise of the Protestant dominated nation-state west.
"volkerwanderung" -- "The Migration Period". From the perspective of Roman Empire, the invasion of the barbarians ... with the obvious metaphor to today.
The end follows. I maintain that we DID (or at least W did) however make a SUCCESSFUL but very expensive "turning point" from 2001-2008. If the path set had been maintained, the world may well still be at peace, ISIS never rising, and Iran contained. The left could still lament a small contingent of troops in Iraq with deaths on the order of what we see in Afghanistan and claim "it was all unnecessary" -- but instead ...
And turning points were not recognized or taken, most notably the moment in late 2015 when the U.S. could have inventoried the region to determine those states and parties in or on the side of world order and those who would destroy and replace it so as to firmly support the former and resolutely oppose the latter.
It was not to be. The collapse of the Westphalian state system meant that the foundations for the values they upheld—open trade, open expression, consent of the governed, and universal human rights—crumbled as well, and the remaining states of the core region of the world withered away.
As the historian Edward Gibbon mused when writing about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps the time would come when the interpretation of the Koran would “be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.”
It has come to pass.'via Blog this'
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