Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies.

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.