Some people think that you can 'instabuild' a nation, you know, knock one down and another will spontaneously replace it.
Take our own, one could regard prerevolutionary America as a stable area with an organized central government, albeit on the other side of the Atlantic.
OK, so we had a war of Independence which lasted from 1775 to 1783 with Independence being declared on the 4th of July 1776.
In theory the first election occurred in 1788/79 when about 1.3% of the population actually had the vote/voted.
We then had the little matter of a civil war from 1861 to 1865 and still have some that cant quite grasp the outcome.
Most people still could not vote, universal suffrage did not occur until 1965 and still some are working hard to disenfranchise certain voters.
So basically from colony to becoming a fully democratic State took 190 years and is still a work in progress.
The Wars with Native Americans lasted from about 1622 to about 1924 for a total of 302 years, one can argue about the actual starting and ending dates, I'll take it as an approximate time frame.
Many died during these centuries of conflict, many suffered, we are still trying to right many of the wrongs. Have we in fact finished?
Other nations took a great deal longer to sort themselves out, if at all.
So it is always astounding to me when our dear neoconservatives [and many Americans] can think we can waltz into a country, overthrow a government, tear apart its institutions and then expect 'instademocracy' and peace. Then they also act surprised when we are not treated as liberators and regarded as exceptionally lovely. Then they want us to go back there once the shit has well and truly hit the fan and give it another whirl without changing one damn thing in the way we approach the problem.
Our foreign policy over the decades has hardly been a roaring success when we topple or prop up various governments, war on drugs, war on terror and mass killings to name a few of the consequences. In the end authoritarian communist governments collapsed or changed from the inside, same thing goes for terrorist groups. have more or less people died as a result of our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq then would have done otherwise, have they made us safer? Has bombing Libya improved the situation? Are we ready to go fight Daesh on the ground? Should we? Is there an actual plan of what we do afterwards, do we then attack Assad? Iran? Did our multitude of interventions globally decrease or increase extremism?
As for another theater has the expansion of NATO been a necessary step towards world peace, or is it a destabilizing strategy?
Nation building is a long and laborious process, have we actually finished building our own?
Just an incomplete thought.