"Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us until Obama. Then our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight. No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.
The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men.
If we learn anything from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and from September 11, let it be this.
There have to be boundaries, physical and conceptual borders, between us and the rest of the world. American exceptionalism can’t be a narcissistic belief that everyone ought to be like us. If everyone could become us, there would be nothing exceptional about us. Our exceptionalism is that the rest of the world isn’t like us and never will be. And that if we want to protect ourselves, we have to stop trying to define the world or allowing the rest of the world to redefine America.
Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world."
A beautiful idea. But how can it be put into practice now that the oligarchs who hate America are firmly in power and will do everything, anything, to stay in power?