TAMPA, April 9, 2013 – It would be the stuff of a Peter Sellers satireif there weren’t for nuclear weapons and 26,000 American troops needlessly in harm’s way. A tiny dictatorship that has to cook the books even to call itself “third world” has the world’s “lone superpower” dancing on a string. It is a fitting tribute to 100 years of U.S. foreign policy failure.

When you invade and occupy a country, it almost always ends badly, as the British found out before the United States and Napoleon found out before them. Napoleon’s exploits in Spain are particularly instructive in understanding the U.S. government’s boondoggle in Iraq.

But it is only after you have got yourself stuck somewhere for 60 years that costly and tragic turns to ridiculous. Having unintentionally kept a multi-generational dictatorship in power by rallying its people around it, the U.S. finds itself outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a despot whose father might have suffered Il Duce’s fate if not for the continued presence of U.S. troops on North Korea’s border.