The current diplomatic failure did not accumulate all at once out of nothing. We dropped the ball when the Berlin Wall fell. Then and there we should have made bosom buddies of the new Russians, setting up a world-straddling cooperation with them minding Europe, and us the Pacific. To anyone with half a brain, the real danger in the world is obviously free nukes - and the only way to get a handle on the problem would have been to get real cozy with the Russians and new states that were once SSRs.

I think I gave up on politics about the time (1990) when it became clear that our attitude to the people who had thrown of tyranny was basically "hey, it's a hard world, sink or swim. To us, you're still just a pack of useless commies."

Then we let Sodamn get away when there was no earthly reason to keep him around. and the perfect pretext existed to march into Babylon and snag him.

Clinton made things infinitely worse by letting the situation in Yugoslavia and the Israel/Palestine conflict get out of hand. This was his real failure as President - not his sex obsession. We should have clamped down on Israel in definite, unpretty terms - as in "deal with the Palestians justly or we will do it for you - and you won't like it. If you think you're so tough, you want a piece of us?" Israel remains a miserable, unjust regime, directly opposed to our political ideals - a pissy bunch of ungrateful leeches who we should have shed ourselves of long ago.

It took a long time to get here, it will take a long time to get back to some semblance cooperation with the other 95% of the inhabitants of this sphere.