A Modern Miracle?

This is not the first time a transformative message from a flawed man changed the course of history.

I've long held that Sunni and Shia Muslims must have their own peace accords, like the Protestants and Catholics did in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia — which only happened after centuries of religious wars.

Here in the modern world we tried George H.W.'s "new world order" and George W's "war on terror." We tried Barack's "soft power" under Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. We tried "nation building" under all of those failed regimes. When we went up the hill with Joe and Jill, Joe fell down and broke his crown.

Some of us supported one or all of those efforts. All we got was a lousy "co-exist" t-shirt, a massive influx of third world people who have no desire to co-exist in a first-world society, and the utter destruction of every hard-fought norm that built successive versions of the West over the last thousand years. The world will move on, but the nations of the West may never recover from the nation builders.

And then there's Trump in Saudi Arabia (in the linked video above, I've skipped past Trump's domestic message). No one knows how this turns out, but it wouldn't be the first time a transformative message from a flawed man changed the course of history:

"Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce not chaos. Where it exports technology, not terrorism. And where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together not bombing each other out of existence."

"It is crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from western interventionalists, or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No. ... In the end, the so-called 'nation builders' wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves."