Dostoyevsky’s Demons

Martin Sieff wonders why a nation with a dysfunctional political system and deeply divided culture, still believes that it can decide what is best for other nations, while knowing very little about them.

...the manic American obsession with lecturing other nations around the world and then intervening recklessly and without end to topple governments and remake entire societies. Over the past half century these endless misadventures in so-called “nation building” (in reality the exact opposite, the destruction of nations) have failed catastrophically wherever they have been tried.

He asks,

Why the genuine universally held confidence that the United States is the most prosperous, fairest, least violent, most secure and plain happiest society anywhere in the world — universally shared by those who have never been to any other ones?

Why the charming but bizarre resistance to learning true facts about daily life in other countries among all those who have never actually visited them — and have no intention of ever doing so?