1989, the Berlin Wall crashes, and a lot of
America jumped with joy.
We won the Cold War, et cetera.
Whether that's true, it's a different debate.
But there were a couple scholars out there
who thought -- you know, like Frank Fukuyama
wrote a book called "The End of History."
He said, "The future is Utopia.
It's going to be all great.
There's not going to be any more political
disagreement anywhere in the world because
American democracy has won the war of ideas
that's ancient and old."
Which is absurd, but this absurdity became
a New York Times bestseller and launched his
career and et cetera.
And ever since then, this idea of American
exceptionalism has sought to create a world
order that's really a mirror image of ourself.
And many -- and I lived abroad, and to many
people, this looks like ethnic chauvinism.
But we go around, our foreign policy tries
to shore up a world order, a liberal world
order founded on the DNA of American thinking.
And when it can't do that, it contains the
problem, whether it's the Middle East or in
Africa.
And the way this looks -- how this comes out
in American policy is this.
You hear this phrase for Africa, African solutions
for African problems.
That's really code for containment.
But that doesn't solve any problems.
It doesn't create American order in Africa
or the Middle East, as if that's even feasible
or desirable.
It's not.
What we need to do is move away from containing
problems and solve them.
And problem-solving does not mean that you're
going to make the world look like the place
you want it to be.
Problem-solving can also be the world makes
you look like it wants to be.
And we need to move on, whether it's -- and
not just in foreign policy, but again, like
in warfare.
We are fighting according to our rules of
war, yet those rules no longer apply.
And then we wonder why Afghanistan is the
longest war in history.
That's the world we're up against.
