Throwing money at problems is a fools errand

 Newsmax:

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More than ever, it's evident that President Trump views the world through the lens of a business deal — how to make the best one possible.

In his speech in Riyadh, the president rightly criticized the failures of previous U.S. approaches in the region:

"The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits. ... In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. The interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves."

President Trump is right. While I supported efforts to eliminate terrorist threats to the United States — and still believe we have a moral and strategic responsibility to protect ourselves and Israel from a nuclear-equipped Iran — I opposed the Bush-era notion of "nation building" from the beginning.

The belief that, with enough money, one could till the soil of Islamic authoritarianism and plant the seeds of freedom endemic to our constitutional Republic was rooted in a deeply flawed worldview.

It was a fool's errand to think that drafting a constitution for Afghanistan would give rise to a nation that recognizes and protects God-given rights. Freedom is not the product of imposed institutions — it springs from a transformed people, something politics, foreign aid, and even business alone can never produce.

In fact, that flawed thinking is cut from the same ideological cloth as Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. After 50 years, it had cost taxpayers more than $22 trillion — with little to show for it in terms of real human flourishing.
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Islamic societies are not failures because of a lack of funding.  They have squandered money without lefting the lower end of the spectrum.  A few of the elites in these societies have become extremely wealthy, while the common folks have not.  As for Afghanistan, that country was much better off before the Islamists came to power.  As a student at the University of Texas in the sixties, I had friends from Afghanistan who were funded by the country in their educational pursuits.  They were clearly not those who make up the current regime of religious bigots now controlling the country.