Another cold-eyed but well-argued Spengler piece

In this magisterial article, David P Goldman argues that America has bungled everything for a decade-and-a-half, and is frankly now incapable of affecting much in the world.  Worse, and this has been an emerging theme, the USA has so burnt its old allies, from the Saudis through the EU to the UK, that it will find out about stuff after the deals have been struck, and after the events have occurred.

No-one could have walked into the Oval Office in 2001 and told then president George W Bush that his job was to manage the inevitable decline of Muslim civilization: to humiliate the Iranians, to hobble the contending parties and to leave as much power as possible in the hands of abhorrent military or monarchical governments. No-one could have gone to American universities and recruited the soldiers, spies and diplomats to execute a plan which preferred the slow and inevitable spread of human misery to a cataclysmic alternative.

In another thread from his recent thinking, he argues

It has become nearly impossible in America to ask the question: Which cultures are viable and which are not? Individuals of all cultures are viable Americans, but that is not necessarily true of the culture they left behind. 

This question, of course, is one that NZ must increasingly ask itself, as we are confronted with visibly destructive (albeit and mercifully, not widely geographically distributed) cultures.

Spengler's view is simple:

It is a fool’s errand to stabilize them; the best one can do is to prevent their problems from spilling over onto us.