"The high-water mark of the American Empire was...." Pretend you're a historian and fill in the

[zipplewrath]

36. Lessons unlearned

I guess I see that period as one of "the lessons unlearned". We should have learned by the time of N. Korea, the dangers of involving ourselves in local civil wars. I thought we had truly learned the lesson in Vietnam. But Jr. never learned that lesson and we found ourselves in both Afghanistan AND Iraq re-learning the limited powers of an Empire. Clinton was a period of post Cold War change in which there were short term opportunities to be had as the Soviet Empire collapsed. Kosovo, Croatia and the general collapse of eastern europe gave us 1 time, short term, opportunities. There may have been some misunderstanding about what we were able to accomplish there that shouldn't have been transferred to the Middle East. The success in N. Ireland was attempted to be repeated in Israel/Palestine to no avail.

It is hard to imagine where we might be if the 2000 election had been in line with the popular vote. Would 9/11 even happened? Would we be in Iraq at all? Would we be more engaged in Yemen and Somalia? Would Katrina have been the impetus for an entirely different infrastructure effort that would have been leveraged with the economic collapse? Would the push for a medicare drug plan have morphed into a larger "medicare for all"?

We could be "on the rise" so to speak, especially if we had been in a better position to deal with the economic collapse, and leverage the economic situation instead of treading water. So in that respect, one could at least argue that Jr. was responsible for tilting the curve severely down, not to mention squandering more opportunities than can be imagined.