They are not like us

The United States is the world’s only superpower, and Americans believe our power can be injected in any part of the world at any time. Whether that injection is right, proper and moral is not part of the argument; the agreement is that we can.

Until recently, most of us failed to realize much of the rest of the world does not care if we can move land, air and sea forces anywhere we want.

Superpower just doesn’t carry the same meaning as when there were two, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Michael J. Totten gets into that realization with his “The International Elite Bubble,” stating that Western elites have fooled themselves into believing forces of good and right and proper are ascendant in the world today. That belief, Totten says, simply is not true.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/international-elite-bubble?utm_source=World+Affairs+Newsletter&utm_campaign=69ba6b27d0-Blog_Totten_Marlowe_Motyl_1_10_2013&utm_medium=email

Totten references Robert D. Kaplan’s December column in The Wall Street Journal, in which Kaplan says “Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.”

Kaplan, Totten says, “is quite right that Western internationalists often don’t like to see what’s going on outside elite bubbles in distant societies.”

What is going on is the same fight for the same pieces of land that the same people have argued over even before modern religion and nationalism. Kaplan again: “The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map.”

That is a hard reality for Western elites to swallow, after years and years of educating the heathen, bringing the barbarian into the fold of leagues of nations and nations united. Hard reality, though, remains real.

Kaplan’s article is here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323297104578174932950587010.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I disagree with the subhead: ‘The spread of universal values is being rolled back on many fronts, from Russia to the Middle East.’

“Universal values” requires definition, and definition will not be the same between a university educated Westerner and an Easterner in Central Asia.