Why nation-building can’t work

 

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Wednesday

January 26, 2011

 

 

Why Nation-Building

Can’t Work

 

 

(1) You can’t impose your goals on others as if they were simply empty vessels for you to fill. Alexander the Great tried to Hellenize the world he had conquered, but to no avail: That world threw off the Greek customs just as soon as he died. To think that foreign people have no preexisting customs or goals of their own is hubris, thus let us learn from the mistakes of Alexander.

(2) To impose democracy on foreign people or to nation-build in their country is a utopian impossibility. Where are you going with this? Do you actually imagine you’re going to impose democracy on the entire world? Do you know what you would have to do to accomplish that, the amount of force that would be required?

(3) The project of nation-building is a cop-out: We only engage in it so as to cover-up our lack of will to really take care of the problems we have with certain other countries in the world. In other words, we are afraid of killing the somebodies in troublesome countries and so we content ourselves with killing the nobodies. We have the deadpan nerve to call that wisdom.

(4) Nation-building actually keeps alive the very problem it was slated to take care of. In other words, when you go in to nation-build, you naturally keep the domestic factions apart and thereby prevent them from coming to a settlement among themselves. The very logic you’ve set in motion by invading you then prevent from being played out to its conclusion. This then keeps the existing ruling class from being defeated and annihilated. You’ve kept the troublesome people in power by sheltering them, and you’ve essentially taken their side by nation-building. (If you had the sense to simply crush that ruling class, you would certainly also have the sense to leave forthwith after that, and not get involved in their domestic tangles.) And oh, yes, please don’t mention elections sponsored by us in the foreign country: I just ate, and I don’t want to vomit. Clean clothes, you understand.

(5) It’s too indecisive. Americans naturally want short wars, not long drawn-out ones. Nation-building gets indecisive for two reasons: Domestic factions in America will start to clamor, with some of them taking the side of the enemy. This will pressure our government to be more gentle with the enemy, that is, with the ruling class, the foreign regime, than is necessary to defeat it. This will draw-out the war. Also, to nation-build, you must use the military as a police-force, to act as crowd-control basically, and it is most certainly not that type of animal. The purpose of a military force is to crush. But this mere policing will result in a stasis that draws things out, too. In fact, it’s the actual image itself of drawing things out: The military reduced to patrolling the streets indefinitely.

(6) It harms our national security. We will use up our resources in a mistaken, profligate way, and in addition simultaneously spout pieties about universal peace. The latter activity makes us sitting ducks for the unscrupulous, who will take advantage that we are not pressing our own advantages or emphasizing our self-interest. We will get taken to the cleaners by eschewing natural self-regard.

 

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