http://lobelog.com/nation-building-is-back-now-with-contractors/#more-37012

“Nation-Building” Is Back: Now with Contractors

by Tim Shorrock
Last month, President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times that the United States under his watch will not “be a nation builder.” It was a variation on a comment he had made dozens of times during the campaign as he attempted to lay out a vision for a new foreign policy that will avoid the pitfalls of his predecessors, particularly the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
Ironically, Trump made that proclamation at a time when the term has reentered the vernacular of the U.S. military and foreign policy elite. Long identified with the war in Iraq and the US-NATO counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, the phrase “nation-building” has renewed currency as the U.S. military and its allies confront a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East that has produced the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Barely two weeks before Trump’s election, in fact, I heard the term used several times by senior defense and State Department officials. “We may not be interested in nation building, but nation building is interested in us,” a senior Pentagon official said on October 26 at a Washington conference on how US government agencies should confront the social chaos engulfing the Middle East.http://lobelog.com/nation-building-is-back-now-with-contractors/#more-37012