But the US – and every other country that ever existed – does and should deal with governments which are anathema to their own beliefs. This is hard to accept nowadays when people think moral pressure expressed in boycotts can correct the perceived failings of governments in distant lands.

But what’s the alternative? If you have a failed state, like Somalia or Afghanistan in the days of the Taliban, which I think had recognition by only one or two other states, there can be no dealing at all. There’s no rule of law; no one who can deal with criminals or provide a legal framework to solve trade disputes. Even an evil government is preferable.

Of course it’s tempting to pursue a country’s political ends by actually undermining the evil government, but that’s an extremely risky procedure, and you can end up like the US did in Vietnam; propping up an unviable local government until that policy became politically unviable back in the US. That doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

Pretending that we (as a country) will only deal with countries whose governments live up to our own standards seems to me to be singularly pointless. It won’t happen, especially since the worse cases are often the ones we need to do something about, either because of trade or because instability tends to spread. And if the internal dissent is inspired by our way of life; that’s one thing. Meddling or controlling or creating internal dissent to try to create something in our own image is an extremely high-risk policy. There’s always another group of dissenters to scream ‘neo-colonialism’ and there’s always the risk of propping up a faction that doesn’t have local support and thereby makes matters worse.

It might also be that subset that JH mentions, which is the US left refusing to see what was/is going on in any left/socialist/communist country. The oddest thing is that mentality still exists with Russia, which is now not the least bit “left/socialist” — it’s a poorly regulated capitalist country run by a group of plundering bureaucrats, who are stealing the nation’s wealth while most of the people live in poverty or want, facilitated by taking away their right to information and any kind of political action. The leftwing should hate these guys. And yet they are constantly cherry-picking facts to make it seem as if they are a reasonable bunch of men just objecting to US hegemony.

The South Vietnam government would shut down a newspaper and the anti war people would say “Why are we supporting a government that doesn’t allow freedom of the press. They completely ignored the fact that North Veitnam was a communist government and NO communist government allowed any freedom of the press.

Put it another way. On a civil rights scale of 0 to 10, I would have rated South Vietnam as 5 but I would have rated North Vietnam as 0.5. The anti-war people I knew could only see the 5 and ignored the very low rating of the alternative.

Is this part of the “I hate my society” problem?

And, of course, all the estimated dates of composition fall at the tail end of the the Wars of the Diadochi. The Eastern Med had seen in two or three generations Phillip of Macedon’s wars of conquest, Alexander’s overthrow of the Persian Empire, and now Alexander’s generals (Seleucus was one) were fighting over the spoils from Italy to the Himalayas. The Indians may really have looked fairly peaceful by comparison.

But the overall point is well taken: there is a strain in Western thought that seems to begin with Athens some time prior to the Peloponesian Wars–first curious about foreigners, then judging them by their own standards, then going completely delusional and attributing to the foreigners all manner of perceived virtues–including, generally, a love of peace and a benevolence toward the deluded observer’s culture. Even as delusions run, this one is unusually unproductive and dangerous. Last week I heard an old and skilled observer warning young men headed overseas: “when the reality you see on the ground contradicts what you were taught in the Kennedy School of Government, believe your own eyes.” It’s good advice, but as I was listening to it, I was also hearing George Orwell: “to see what is before one’s own eyes requires constant struggle.”

And always we circle back to the human tendency to believe what we want to be true IS true. I’ve never met a proponent of the Peaceful Foreigner fallacy who didn’t have some advantage from it being true–if it were true.

And of course only a few days’ walk down the toad from classical Athens, we have classical Sparta–not only unwilling to learn from foreigners, darn near unable to learn from Greeks.

That Roman and Victorian British balance–the willingness to study and adapt what was best of others without losing track of whose side one is on is a very rare gift–possibly because we do so little to cultivate it.

I’m not sure about this and would be interested to know which writers you mean.

I don’t think it’s so much a current split as two tendencies in the Western tradition: one was to find the “other” savages in need of civilizing; the other was to romanticize them as having some pure quality we lost or never had. I think we have been swinging from one extreme to the other and are now in the romanticizing and self-blaming phase, intensified by the fact that some folks in places we either romanticize and/blame ourselves for (South and Latin America, Africa, Middle East) find it convenient to romanticize their past and blame us for everything that is wrong now, rather than taking responsibility.

I throw my hands up when people insist that “all the problems in the Middle East were caused by first the British and then the Americans,” and conveniently forget the waves of conquest over the millenia. Or scream about “imposing democracy” while forgeting that previous waves of conquerers always imposed whatever they wanted. (Not defending Bush, mind you.)

I agree that it’s dangerous.

I thought I’d toss that in as food for discussion.

Cheryl