Quote Originally Posted by Noncommunist View Post
On the other hand, the middle eastern loons have no capacity to bomb us back to the stone age. At absolute worst, they might nuke a city which would be bad. However, the chances of that happening are slim to none and it still wouldn't be as bad as what Putin could do if he really wanted to do so.
The channel of communication was sufficient for us to bilaterally reduce nuclear threats and stockpiles. This bilateralism was possible because we had enough in common to make such agreement possible. Conflict was within mutually understood bounds. With the middle eastern lot, they operate by a drastically different set of values, and there is no scope for a similar bilateralism. The closest we had was when strongmen ruled these countries, putting down opposition inside their own borders whilst jockeying for international position. That we could deal with state to state. But we got too full of our own penchant for freedom and democracy, and overthrew these strongmen so that their populations could join us in the new democratic world. Well, this is the new democratic world, and the regimes being chosen aren't what we hoped for.

Parallel to this is the case of Turkey. We opposed the old Kemalist regime because we considered it anti-democratic. The Turkish people are now freer to choose the government they like, and it's one which is more alien to us than the old westernised Kemalist Turkey which we could broadly identify with. Sure, it's better than basket cases like Iraq, but perhaps secularism might have spread further in Turkey had we left them to their own devices for longer, rather than press them to conform to our democratic ideals. Sometimes, the general population of a country may be so foreign to us that their idea of what is good may work on a completely set of rules to what we consider to be the case.