On this most chest-thumping of Fourths of July, with pyrotechnics bursting in air and tanks standing guard on Washington's Mall as fierce sentinels, it would be valuable for the nation to reflect that America's independence owes as much to British folly as it does to the colonialists' valor and zeal for liberty.
I throw out this troublesome reminder because the ebullient president who's so eager to wrap himself in a flag-waving display of American superiority and might has, even as the republic celebrates Independence Day, confronted Iran with a series of actions that are, in their wrong-headed way, as mercurial, ineffective and antagonizingly provocative as those that George IIIand his parliament hurled at the 13 colonies. And, like the certifiably mad British monarch, this “very stable genius” (to quote his self-appraisal) of an American president is charging down a path that seems doomed to result in the very opposite of what he hopes to accomplish.
It was the inestimable Barbara W. Tuchman who first laid out a cogent history of the colossal ineptitude of England's foreign policy toward the colonies in her erudite and instructive book, “The March of Folly,” published in 1984 — a time when a hand-wringing America was still trying to make sense of the folly of Vietnam and had not yet begun to imagine the Gulf War fiasco or the apparently endless involvement in Afghanistan.
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