http://www.transconflict.com/2014/11/mistakes-were-made-311/

Mistakes were made

November 3, 2014 3:14 pm

Global inequality – countries divided into “haves” and “have-nots” – leads to whole groups feeling that the “modern” world has no room for them.  They become mobilizable for identity conflicts, where the identity may be anything that explains why “we” are left out.
By Gerard M. Gallucci The West has occupied the center of world events for the last centuries.  Through “discovery” of new lands, the subsequent absorption of them into colonial empires and the use of resources from everywhere, it built the modern world.  This was an essentially biological process of expansion of the sort that has characterized our human species for the last hundred thousand years.  Often brutal, always bringing spoils to the victor.  Out of the latest phase of expansion beginning in the 15th century, the domination of the West Europeans and their New World descendants grew.  In the process, mistakes were made – exploitation, war, cultural and political imperialism – but it’s possible to argue that we didn’t really know any better; that’s the way things have always been.  One might further say that Europe just “bumped” into World War I, blundering through imperial miscalculation into the 20th century that was to come.
The Great War conceivably might have woken us up to the need to bring some rational order to the world.  The League of Nations was a nod in that direction.  But mistakes were made in the post-war period and Hitler rose to power and we endured another World War.
Along the way, an argument developed between those who believed the best way to order civilization was to allow the “invisible hand” of free-market capitalism to determine human relations and those who believed the state should do it.  The West – led by the United States – grew rather paranoid about this disagreement and mistakes were made.  While professing the belief that our system was better, we acted as if we didn’t believe it by pursuing a military strategy and foreign policy aimed at “containing” the “communists” wherever they might pop up, from the Americas through Africa and Asia.  Interventions, support for dictatorships and dirty wars followed.  The Cold War provided a simple organizing principle for US foreign policy – “us vs. them” – but eventually became one grand self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you build an enemy, it will come.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Washington was left not knowing what to do.  Mistakes were made.  Zombie-like, the US acted as if Moscow remained the enemy and led NATO forward through the former Warsaw Pact and into the old USSR itself.  The EU went obediently along while working on its own project of building a common economy without the central institutions necessary to support it.  Faced with momentous decisions of what to do with its eastern (Russian) and southern (Islamic) flank, EU members refused to let in Turkey, made no provision for Russia (beyond becoming dependent on its gas) and finally stumbled into Ukraine.  Meanwhile, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld led us into the catastrophes of Afghanistan and Iraq, where further mistakes were made.  For its encore, the US – pushing its standby “policy” of support for “democracy and human rights” – led the chorus welcoming the “Arab Spring” and helping to bring disorder to Libya, Egypt and Syria
This is, of course, a very condensed version of history.  But the point I wish to make is this: after World War II – when we should have learned better – the US and its European allies have pursued a collective foreign policy based on illusion, political expediency and the belief that the answer to all problems is military.  To be sure, the US has one big, expensive military.  But as the saying goes, if all the tools in your box are hammers, then everything you meet is a nail.http://www.transconflict.com/2014/11/mistakes-were-made-311/