Neibuhr, writing about a newly predominant America 50 years ago:
The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also … brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.
Or think of Rome, as Cullen Murphy suggests in Are We Rome? Or think of oil, fervently desired, and the vast web of history in Arabia and the Middle East in which America seems so hopelessly entangled because of it.
