The economic and military might of the United States gives us enormous power to influence events in distant lands. But having a lot of ability to influence events is unlikely to achieve anything useful unless you actually understand what’s happening. And when we get involves in things like the internal politics of Pakistan, or political reform in Egypt, or wars in the Horn of Africa, and so forth we’re dealing in situations where the level of understanding is incredibly asymmetric. If you go to pretty much any country in the world, you’ll find that educated people there know more about the United States than you do about their country. Nobody at highest levels of the American government speaks Urdu. Or Arabic. Or Amharic or Somali or Pashto or Tajik.
This basically captures why I’m intensely skeptical of American intervention abroad. There is a tremendous amount of cultural distance between the United States and most Middle Eastern or Central Asian societies, so much so that even the most well-informed American would have trouble successfully navigating the cultural and political landscape. Of course, that’s not to say that navigation impossible, but to say that it requires a level of effort and commitment which the United States simply isn’t capable of providing. And even if it were, even if the United States could invest the resources necessary to gain a complete (or at least mostly complete) understanding of Iraq, or Afghanistan or Pakistan, then it isn’t necessarily the case that this would be beneficial to American interests. At one point, “success” in Iraq was possible, but that doesn’t mean that Iraq was a good idea to begin with. This seems obvious to me, but then again, I don’t live, work and think within in an establishment that is completely invested in an optimistic/deeply ahistorical conception of American power and its efficacy.
- See, my title is different because I spelled “Problems” correctly!
0 Responses to “Comprehension Problems*”