I think I have to read this.
“The danger of American foreign policy,” [John Gray] writes, “is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished.” Such foolishness, he points out, is far removed from the wisdom of America’s founding fathers, for whom “the purpose of government was not to conduct us to the Promised Land but to stave off the recurrent evils to which human life is naturally prone”.
Link (via Arts & Letters Daily)