Idiots are playing geopolitics
About a decade ago I met a man who was home from Afghanistan on leave. He said he was a colonel and worked on strategy in Kabul.
Being a long student of history and geopolitics, I inquired about his thoughts. He didn't have many. He repeated trite lines and had no idea of history or geopolitics.
When I asked point blank, “What does the US gain from our occupation of Afghanistan?” he responded, “It's right next to Iran!”. He had no depth or thoughts beyond that.
I have a cousin who is a pretty smart guy and he works in DC trying to help American decision makers have tools to guide them in dealing with foreign countries. He has said that none are very bright and they never even care to learn much about a country before making decisions about it.
This isn't new. Foolish Americans have long traveled the world screwing things up. It isn't just the liberal internationalists. There is just a huge mental block for them to understand people in other countries are “different”.
Of course, our DC elites don't even understand their own country. It would be much to expect them to understand a different one.
Years ago I wrote a paper on Vietnam. Digging into archives, I found that the US spent more money on Vietnam after WW2 than any other country, through 1960. This was more than England, France, Germany, Japan, etc., countries devastated by war which we rebuilt. A colony that had been a side show during WW2 suddenly became a grand American experiment.
Government officials decided to attempt to recreate the New Deal in Vietnam. They put into place numerous New Deal programs in Vietnam, employing numerous academics and bureaucrats. These people started all sorts of programs, none of which worked.
One example was starting an agricultural office in every province in the country, to educate the people in American farm techniques. And other was to create science libraries throughout the country, though most only had 5 or 6 magazines, even after several years.
They made no effort to understand Vietnam or the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese cultural, tradition, and thought. The US officials just thought they were like the Chinese. They had no understandable that the entire Vietnamese psyche was centered on resistance to foreign domination.
Similar failures have taken place around the world. There just isn't a good understanding of the world or the goals, outside of maintaining US primacy in the world.
We are led by idiots.