In his Washington Post column Fred Hiatt points to something interesting in President Obama’s State of the Union message. Whatever optimism it expressed with respect to the United States, it exhibited substantial fatalism with respect to foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East:
“The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,†Obama said.
And “instability will continue for decades in many parts of the world — in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, in parts of Central America, in Africa, and Asia.â€
Why would a president ask Americans to assume that the problems of Central America, say, are intractable and inevitable? Of the region’s seven small nations (total population: 42 million), some, such as Costa Rica, have been enviably stable for decades. Others, it’s true, have problems: gang violence in El Salvador; corrupt, pseudo-leftist, Venezuela-fueled authoritarianism in Nicaragua.
Bear with me for a moment. Let’s assume that’s right and the problems of Central America or the Middle East are simply intractable, things that must be coped with with.
Issues like instability, poverty, and violence aren’t free-standing. They come from people. Is our culture so overwhelming that when the people who are experiencing these problems come over here they leave the problems behind? Or do they bring their problems with them? Or is it some of both?
You’re asking the wrong questions, and Hiatt is missing the point. The point is that the problems in these areas are truly intractable, they will produce masses of refugees that it is out responsibility as Americans to let into our country.
You’re not supposed to think or ask questions or even wonder if this is good or bad for America & especially Americans. It’s good for the billionaires that run the country and the Democratic Party, and that’s enough. So shut the fuck up already before you’re accused of a hate crime and get bombed by a drone. We’d hate to have anything happen to your dogs.
I think the problem is that it got cold in winter. Oh, wait. That’s the excuse for the economy.
Never mind.
“Is our culture so overwhelming that when the people who are experiencing these problems come over here they leave the problems behind?”
No. American culture tends towards individualism, there is not much “American culture” that attracts and incorporates foreigners into a new set of cultural assumptions. Making things worse, multiculturalism in education is adverse to such assimilation.
I was watching an extended news program from France about new educational curriculum to teach religious secularism — if I understood correctly one-hour per week until older and then two-hours per week. The content was banal, and seemed ill-equipped to answer questions like “Why does the government ban burqas if freedom of expression means that the government does not interfere with individual choice?” Mostly it was awkward because culture is not usually learned by people raised in that culture, but at least the French are trying to teach and support their culture.
They’ve been trying for 200 years. That’s what the Académie française is for. It’s just fighting a holding action.
I came away with a different take on that line. If instability is intractable and will last a generation, why are we spending our blood and treasure trying to create stability?
It is not a coincidence that there are effectively no majority Muslim nations where people are free to read, speak, support, oppose, gather or worship as they choose. Turkey which had long been the counter is heading for religious autocracy, leaving a struggling Tunisia to represent a very shaky hope as best it can and for as long as it can.
This notion that we and the Europeans should import large numbers of mostly young men from the most unstable nations on earth, nations with no tradition of democracy, no tradition of tolerance, no notion of the equality of women or the rights of gays, and who hold these retro opinions as a matter of core religious faith, seems bizarre to me. I don’t get it. It’s all risk and no easily discernible reward. It’s as if liberals are determined to import folks who in any other circumstances they would despise as bigots to prove a point. What point? Are they trying to impress the god many don’t believe in? Are there brownie points being handed out for heedless, self-destructive acts?
I suspect they were caught off-guard when the reckless Ms. Merkel threw open the doors of Europe, and when Mr. Obama leapt off the cliff with her, the lemmings followed.
It really would have been so easy to say, “In view of recent events we are temporarily pausing our refugee program while we carefully re-examine our screening measures.” That’s it, that’s all it would have taken, and you wouldn’t have Trump yelling about Muslims, and you’d cut the legs out from under the Front National and UKIP and whatever the latest German version is. This is a classic unforced error. The politics alone, setting aside the security issues per se, is fantastically stupid: all risk, no reward.
According to Freedom House’s reckoning of freedom in the world, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Albania are all about as free as Mexico or the countries of Central America. Maybe that’s damning with faint praise.
My yardstick isn’t whether a country is majority Muslim but how great the influence of Gulf Arab countries. The greater the influence of Gulf Arab countries, the greater the likelihood of substantially impaired political and civil freedom.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that the greater the influence of countries of the old Roman Tetrarchy’s Distict of Constantius, i.e. west of the Diocletian Line, the greater the likelihood of political and civil freedom. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, either.
According to Freedom House’s reckoning of freedom in the world, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Albania are all about as free as Mexico or the countries of Central America. Maybe that’s damning with faint praise.
I actually think that’s doing okay in the scheme of things.
You’ve pretty much nailed the problem for non-Arab Muslim countries, but I doubt there’s anything to be done for any Arab country.
I would also suspect that the prevalence of cousin marriage has something to do with it, though I’m having trouble finding the good map I had seen last year on the topic.
My suspicion is that there are a number of different social issues involved. For example, the tribal system that’s in place in the Arab Middle East. Shame society rather than a guilt society. And so on.