The Birth Pangs of the Growing Pains of Something or Other

I will not take the incidences of recent American attacks on Syrian and Pakistani territory to prattle fruitlessly about sovereignty. That ship sailed long ago. Condemning America for failing to respect the territorial sanctity of other states is like accusing the rain of being wet.

Still, one notes the preponderance of militant groups hostile to America and its interests, and though the issue has faded from the fore as the world economy huffs through the final, schizoid moments of its decades-long meth binge, it's worth noting that transnational insurgent groups continue to proliferate. Individually, none of these is the "existential threat" so popular among post-Soviet know-nothings. Nor, for the most part, are they actually fixated on the United States. One of our great, egomaniacal national myths is that the central motivation of Islamic radicals is Death to America. More accurately, their principle motivations are things like: Death to the corrupt, apostate, America-backed government in Islamabad. The September 11, 2001 attacks were an aberration. Insurgent and rebel groups from North Africa through the Middle East, subcontinent, and Pacific archipelagos engage American troops and assets where proximity dictates.

Paradoxically, while some fighters are rootless, semi-religious mercenaries, bopping across borders to get to where the action is, the goals of the various movements and insurgencies tend to be on the local-to-national scale. The Taliban aren't interested in Kansas. Rebels in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas don't care about moral degeneracy in Las Vegas. These people are not seeking to establish some vast caliphate and gobble up the world. The United States, in the principle symptom of our special brand of flailing imperialism, has gotten itself embroiled in a gaggle of civil wars. Most of the nations in question have been modern nation-states for somewhere between fifty and one hundred years. We might recall what happened in America when it was around that age.