The latest American Interest blogpost from Walter Russell Mead, on the ongoing tragedy in Kyrgyzstan, is like all his writings full of wise words and wise thoughts. It’s certainly worth reading the whole thing, even if you can’t find Kyrgyzstan in your atlas. But one sentence especially caught my eye, a sentence which seems to sum up one of the central truths of world history of the last two centuries and of the one just beginning.

“The tragedy of modern life seems to lie in the fact that we cannot live with nationalism and we cannot live without it.”