Wright said:

“…the thing that distinguishes us from right wing realists is to concede that we don’t really have the rule of law globally yet, but to think that we can move in that direction and someday we will have it…”

This reminded me of a story about a bunch of guys using a crane to pull a truck out of a river in Africa – all they succeeded in doing ws to pull the crane into the river alongside the truck.

To people who understood nothing about engineering, all the way through this process it looked as though they were moving steadily towards the state of ‘having the truck back out of the river’. For them, only right at the end did it become clear that this had never been true (and who knows, maybe even then they decided to blame an ‘implementation misstep’ by the crane driver, or a design fault by the American crane manufacturer, etc.). Someone who knew how a crane actually works could have at any stage seen at a glance what was going to happen.

Too often, it seems to me, problems with the left’s social engineering projects, both domestically and internationally, are no more complex than this. The results are just as disastrous, but that doesn’t seem to deter them at all. It’s like watching an endless loop of a movie in which a 4 year old climbs behind the wheel of a car and starts it up.