The study of history is indispensable to the understanding of the present. How many people understand that Turkey has Kurdish problem because of how they did away with the Armenians?

Spengler’s essay entitled Turkey fears Kurds, not Armenians is an excellent example of the type of historical analysis that you should see more often. How many other discussions of Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” in the newspapers make reference the devils bargain that the Turks made with the Kurds in 1915?

The only problem with Spengler’s excellent essay is its conclusion. Spengler has long argued that that America should embrace the instability in the Middle East and use it for its own ends. In past essays, Spengler has held up as his model for American actions the British Empire’s method of playing tribe against tribe and nation against nation to secure their own ends.

But I think that Spengler “realism” is a fundamental misreading of history. It is true that the British often played a Machiavellian game. But the British goal was always the creation of stability. They wanted the competing powers to balance each other out so that they could play the broker. By definition, you can not control chaos.

It was chaos that eventually destroyed the British system. It was the uncontrolled fighting between Hindus and Muslims in India. It was the fighting between Jew and Arab in the Middle East. It was the fighting between blacks and whites in Africa. The effort to maintain stability became more then British people could bear and their empire fell apart.

With chaos threatening to sweep through the Middle East; with Russia in the middle of a demographic death spiral and sitting on one of the largest stocks of nuclear weapons in the world; with China one serious economic crises away from military adventuresome (how else would the goverment maintain legitimacy?); the US is faced with the prospect of so much chaos that its super power status will cease to have any real meaning.

It does not do you much good to be captain of a sinking ship or a superpower in world without stability.