The paralysis of the West? Much worse...

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It is tempting to regard the extraordinary failures of Western foreign policy as incompetence. After all, all sophisticated people say that one should never assume a 'conspiracy' when 'cock-ups' happen so often.

But I have learned that neutrality is all but impossible in this world and where humans are involved. Not everything is significant (although we cannot be sure what is significant at the time it happens) - but everything carries a positive or negative valence.

When foreign policy is so consistently carrying a negative valence, what we have is a negative filed: what we have is something non-accidental, indeed displaying organization.

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Where that organization comes from is another matter - and something that may never be known: but that there is organization is clear.

Thus the failures are organized failures and the incoherence has a unitary reason.

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And the organization comes from intent, from motivation, from the basic world view of the participants in Western foreign policy. It is this which ensures so many failures, and which ensures that any good outcomes will be accidental and soon undone.

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This, of course, means that we are dealing with a very deep problem. A tremendous weight and inertia of falsehood and delusion.

The West is not merely paralyzed - that is, unable to move or moving only slowly. There is a large element of paralysis, but it is not the worst problem: the problem is that the West is trying to the wrong things, aiming at the wrong goals...

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The endemic failures of Western foreign policy are not merely the limitations of action in a complex world: they are both the incoherence and the evil of Leftism writ large: the evil of Leftism is responsible for the bad fundamental aims of policy and the incoherence of Leftism causes the paralysis that relatively thwarts the attainment of these evil aims.

Plus, of course, that there are residual good impulses in everyone, and occasional well-motivated people situated here and there - and the evil and incompetence are thus variously ameliorated; but these instances can be regarded as outliers, and the system is set up to disregard them.  

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