{"id":21496,"date":"2013-08-05T00:01:11","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T05:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21496"},"modified":"2013-08-04T12:16:18","modified_gmt":"2013-08-04T17:16:18","slug":"blundering-into-a-fragile-country-can-make-things-much-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/05\/blundering-into-a-fragile-country-can-make-things-much-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Blundering into a &#8220;fragile country&#8221; can make things much worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/blog\/learning-leave-bad-enough-alone-washingtons-clumsy-meddling-fragile-countries\" target=\"_blank\">Ted Galen Carpenter<\/a> on a big blind spot in US policy:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>U.S. officials too often succumb to the temptation to try to impose order and justice in unstable or misgoverned societies around the world. The temptation is understandable. It is hard to learn about \u2014 much less watch on the nightly news \u2014 brutality, bloodshed, and gross injustice and not want to do something about it. Some foreign policy intellectuals, including the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have become strident lobbyists for the notion of a \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d vulnerable populations.<\/p>\n<p>But it is a temptation that wise policy makers should avoid. U.S. meddling has frequently caused already bad situations to deteriorate further \u2014 especially when Washington has based its humanitarian interventions on the false premise that the subject of our attentions is, or at least ought to be, a coherent nation state. As I point out <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/commentary\/eagle-china-shop-8773\" target=\"_blank\">in an article over at <em>The National Interest<\/em><\/a>, U.S. administrations have made that blunder in Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and other places.<\/p>\n<p>In many parts of the world, the Western concept of a nation state is quite weak, and the concepts of democracy and individual rights are even less developed. The primary loyalty of an inhabitant is likely to be to a clan, tribe, ethnic group or religion. U.S. officials appear to have difficulty grasping that point, and as a result, the United States barges into fragile societies, disrupting what modest order may exist. Washington\u2019s military interventions flail about, shattering delicate political and social connections and disrupting domestic balances of power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ted Galen Carpenter on a big blind spot in US policy: U.S. officials too often succumb to the temptation to try to impose order and justice in unstable or misgoverned societies around the world. The temptation is understandable. It is hard to learn about \u2014 much less watch on the nightly news \u2014 brutality, bloodshed, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,370,13],"tags":[432,156,691],"class_list":["post-21496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-middle-east","category-usa","tag-diplomacy","tag-fail","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5AI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21497,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21496\/revisions\/21497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}