I have the impression that each time that the Caribbean and Latin American countries meet with the President of the United States it’s to request help or complain. Almost always, it’s also to blame the United States for our past, present, and future failures. I don’t think that is fair.

President Arias then reviewed Latin America’s history in a self-critical way that evoked another book, written back in 1976 by a fellow countryman of President Chávez, Carlos Rangel. That book, whose English-language title is The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States, would make an excellent gift—from Obama to Chávez. In it Rangel argued that

Latin Americans now largely accept the idea that our position of inferiority vis-à-vis the United States is due . . . to that country’s exploitation of our subcontinent through the mechanisms of imperialism and dependency. Thus we have fallen prey to the most debilitating and pernicious of several myths through which we have tried to explain our destiny. This myth is debilitating because it attributes all that is wrong in Latin America to external factors. . . . A sincere, rational, scientific examination of North American influence on Latin America’s destiny would have to . . . keep open the possibility that the United States’ overall contribution may have been positive.

Rangel concluded that at the root of Latin America’s problems is neither dependency nor exploitation, but a set of cultural values that impede the consolidation of democratic institutions, the advance of social justice and the achievement of economic development. I am convinced that he was and remains correct, and that cultural change is indispensable to the region’s long-term, sustainable progress.

As a theme, though, love requires the longer look that only a film or play or novel can provide. As it happens, love is one of three top literary themes, the others being death, and what, if anything, happens after death. Yet death can be handled pretty quickly

Managing this war will pose difficult problems both in Afghanistan and here at home. The strategic case for waging war is stronger than that for disengaging, but not by much: The war is a close call on the merits. The stakes for the United States are largely indirect; it will be an expensive war to wage; like most wars, its outcome is uncertain; even success is unlikely to yield a modern, prosperous Switzerland of the Hindu Kush; and as a counterinsurgency campaign its conduct is likely to increase losses and violence in the short term in exchange for a chance at stability in the longer term.

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As all this effort goes forward, it is crucial that we reflect on a simple axiom: War doesn’t play itself out systematically like mathematics or logic. A set of tactics, successful in operation A, will not necessarily succeed in operation B. The transitive property of mathematics is rarely observed in warfare. Afghanistan is not Iraq. That said, there are enduring principles that carry over from one conflict to another in these very different environments.

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The United States conducted a very popular war of aggression and conquest against Mexico in 1846. It fought a Civil War that killed 2 percent of the American population. The United States should be the most anti-imperialist of all democracies on account of the conditions of its birth, and yet, at the end of the 19th century it picked a fight with Spain and acquired an overseas empire.

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On reflection, I found it a bit odd that anyone, even in Bedford, Massachusetts, could complain about a history curriculum that would focus on events that killed millions, traumatized whole civilizations and transformed the global social order. It was perhaps a bit much for General George S. Patton, Jr. to say that, “Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” But a more scholarly appraisal from Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener from York University makes the same essential point in a manner that even a devoutly liberal anthropologist could appreciate: “The most highly organized and largest scale human collective or social action is coalitional aggression, or war.”

This prevailing view of failed states, however, though true, is also incomplete. Failed states are not only a source of domestic calamities; they are also potentially a source of great power competition that in the past has often led to confrontation, crisis and war. The failure of a state creates a vacuum that, especially in strategically important regions, draws in competitive great-power intervention. This more traditional view of state failure is less prevalent these days, for only recently has the prospect of great power competition over failed “vacuum” states returned. But, clearly, recent events in Georgia—as well as possible future scenarios in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as southeastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africa—suggest that it might be a good time to adjust, really to expand, the way we think about “failed states” and the kinds of problems they can cause.

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Niall Ferguson has insightfully described our current predicament as the end of “planet finance.”1 By “planet finance” Ferguson means to draw attention to the fact that since roughly 1980 an elaborate virtual world, practically parallel to the one in which we live and work every day, evolved through inscrutable credit and investment mechanisms. “Credit default swaps” and “mortgage-backed securities”, once obscure expressions, have now become household terms, even if their exact nature remains mysterious. One need not be able to explain what they are to understand that financiers and investors were way off target in determining the values and risks of such instruments. The measures and the reality supposedly measured were out of sync.