[...] The West needs to wake up to the damage caused by the artificial states that they established and that they then propped up with aid. The result: Western-funded military despots that then oppressed their minorities. The foreign aid granted to tyrannies that neither share nor respect Western values has not won the West any friends, as the West in its delusions at times believed it would. To the contrary, this aid has acted to disempower the West’s would-be friends among the Middle East’s many ethnic and religious minorities.

Seeing themselves so hated, and the Middle East in flames, some have begun to argue that the West should pull out of the Middle East and leave the region to its fate. Others argue that the West must make concessions and somehow manage its relations with the despots, otherwise they will turn to the Russians or Chinese for aid, leaving the West at a future disadvantage. The choice for the West, however, is not limited to abandonment or appeasement.

Far better for the West to do what is only right and natural: support our friends; abandon our enemies.

For starters, we should stop propping up hostile regimes, either through direct country-to-country foreign aid or through indirect aid funnelled to these countries through multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. To date, literally hundreds of billions of Western dollars have gone to the region’s despotic and corrupt regimes, keeping them in power while making their leaders and their cronies rich. By putting a stop to the aid, the grip that despotic central governments have over their minorities would loosen. Some of the minorities, their bargaining hand strengthened, would argue for more autonomy within their existing national boundaries. Others would seek to set up a state of their own.

In addition to ending aid to hostile regimes, Western states should undermine these regimes by supporting the aspirations of West-friendly minorities. This too-rarely-tried approach just succeeded in the case of South Sudan, the world’s newest country, which separated from the brutal Islamic regime of Sudan following a referendum last year in which 99% voted for independence. Yesterday, anti-American and anti-German riots broke out in Sudan, but you won’t see any riots on the streets of South Sudan, a country that now lies proudly in the Western camp. The West now has an additional friend in a hostile region of the world; the hostile region now has the people of one fewer region to oppress.

Full essay here