Stephan:   While I was in Colorado doing the Vail and TED events an Estonian woman, probably about 50, came up to me and asked if I had a moment to talk. I told her yes, and she said, "I heard you speak, and I think you'll tell me the truth." I assured her I would do so to the best of my ability.  She sat down and asked me, "Why do Americans hate so much" Why are you so violent?"  This was basically the same question I was asked in Sweden a few months earlier, and I told her what I have been saying for some years in the pages of SR and my column in Explore. The last 25 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have pursued policies supporting an American Exceptionalist view of the world. The Soviet Union was gone we were the boss. It has been an utter disaster, as can be ascertained by spending 10 minutes tracking international headlines. And it has proven almost impossible to stop. I think President Obama had he, alone, been able to chart the course it would have been very different.  But he found failure is not a step it's a process and it has inertia. The last seven years have shown it is almost impossible to affect change.  We still have Republican Presidential candidates calling for yet more bombing in the Islamic world. They find it very hard to accept the obvious. Here is an excellent assessment of one of the important aspects of this trend.