For the past couple of days, I’ve been figuratively banging my head against the wall wondering how everyone writing on foreign relations was buying everything that Obama was saying about the Ukraine situation.
Thankfully, today, Foreign Policy had two good articles detailing the same basic things that I’ve been thinking and saying. My favorite was by Stephen M. Walt, who basically said that history was actually important. (Maybe I should send that to some of my fellow historians.) The other good article was written by Kori Schake.
Walt’s article really hit home, because my focus in grad school was US and European (including Russian) diplomatic history. As a side I also studied global colonialism, which has still has a major impact on world politics. Especially if the focus is how the West treats the rest of the world, and also how much of the world still, at some level, resents the Western colonial powers, including the US and its actions during the Cold War.
In a real sense, the West has seperated themselves from everyone else, and it is beyond a cultural seperation. The problem can be seen with our leaders that still think they know what is best for the world, even if from a historical and cultural perspective there is no chance others could follow the West’s plan.
This doesn’t mean that we should be isolationists, but it does mean that we need to act in an method that shows that we understand other views of thought. It’s been said that “insanity is trying the same thing, but expecting different result.” but it is also insane to ignore some of the actions that have instigated a certain situation. If ALL actions are not accounted for, then it is impossible to find the cure. A doctor can’t do much with the basic symptom of “I feel pain.” The doctor needs much more than that.