Obama's explanatory speech made no sense on the surface, but revealed much in its obvious axioms. Yes, Obama studied the situation, listened to everyone, and made a decision. I don't think the progressive wing of the Democratic party is going to be happy with what he openly said he plans:
To quote an excellent analysis
In short, the US will be fighting immensely costly wars over a considerable portion of the earth’s surface, in regions stretching thousands of miles in every direction.
Reduced to its essentials, the perspective of Obama and his advisors is a future of endless war to maintain the US’ position as the global hegemon.
I think there's no longer a question of how international relations are going to develop.
Islam is based on the concept of there being no possible split between church and state. There's an inherent logic in this position that makes for a very coherent society.
Unfortunately, Islamic societies can easily be swayed to an escalation from differences of opinion to holy war, since every governance difference with an Islamic government (women's rights, apostasy or dress codes, name a few) can easily be made into a theological one.
And although it's thoughtcrime to point out the obvious flaws in the concept of majoritarian democracy, (mob rule for instance, as demonstrated with Proposition 8 or bank bailouts driven by corporocracy, no examples needed, or total control of the media, as the noose tightens on "twittering" demonstrators) the Western population is demonstrably not going to stop slurping heavily at the energy trough.
So, our real rulers will still be Ike's Military Industrial Complex, and its necessary corollaries, the Prison, Pharmaceutical and Educational Complexes, and as many other complexes as have lobbies in our legislatures and political action committees.
Since the energy must flow, from the poor to the rich, the only real change that's likely in the geopolitical struggle will be Who Really Controls the Water, Oil and Food.
I do not think it will be Islam.
Islam will become the advocate of the poor, replacing communism in the future incarnations of the Evil Other, since most of the poor will reside in areas at least seriously infected with the Islamic virus, which will thrive in the conditions that will result from the West's struggles to survive the results of global warming unchecked by any serious attempt to reduce the use of coal, oil and natural gas to provide the creature comforts that relieve the pain of the increasingly parasitized Western poor.
The Catholic Church will applaud, the Protestant Church will applaud, Judaism, busy with walling off its own tubercule in Palestine, will exert its considerable political resources as America's aircraft carrier in the MidEast toward whatever task it is assigned, or assigns itself. Buddhism will abstain, and the Hindus will fight on their own territory, already invaded.
My sources are Huntington, Eisenhower, Naipaul, Hitchens, Wm James, and the host of current researchers in cognitive science, who as they reveal human flaws, also reveal their persistence in the genome.
Enjoy what's left to enjoy. It's what we humans always do.
The only thinker who is really honest about the implausibility of the liberal state, says Fish, is Hobbes:
[B]ecause the equality of right and ability breeds "equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends," and because each man's ends are naturally to be preferred to his rival's, the two will inevitably "become enemies," and in the absence of a neutral arbiter "they will endeavor to destroy or subdue one another."
And there Fish more or less stops. (Well, actually, he goes on to argue in a similar fashion against the logical plausibility of free speech, academic freedom, and blind justice.) Maddeningly, he leads us to the center of the Hobbesian maze, then refuses to extricate us. If life is a war of all against all, what guarantee do we have that adhoccery will work, no matter how inspired? None, of course--at which point Fish generally cackles and says that since he's a pragmatist, he believes that his ideas about the world are just that, ideas without consequences. There is, he says, "no straight line from these propositions to the solution of any real-life problem; they are of no help and do no work except the non-directing work of telling you that you are on your own."
In other words, Fish isn't the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist. But then, so were the pre-Socratics, several Roman philosophers, and Machiavelli. Culturebox certainly can't tell you whether Fish is right or wrong. On the other hand, Fish never claimed to be right. In fact, he once quipped that, now that objectivity is dead, it is no longer necessary to be right. You just have to be interesting.