Why America Will Learn Nothing

Christopher Roach of American Greatness simultaneously bemoans and illustrates the blind spots of America’s thinking class:

Instead of recognizing their fragmented authority at home and decreasing dominance over the Western Hemisphere, our elites prefer to play the great power game overseas, negotiating with other states and deploying the military against them, even as the greatest threats today are more frequently non-state actors, particularly those closer to home.

Roach makes a decent case that Mexico is presently involved in a Fourth Generation war with cartels and other actors. Though in asserting that 4GW primarily concerns a monopoly of force, he misunderstands the most import factor about that war:

Fourth Generation war is at root a contest for legitimacy. On one side is the state. On the other is a vast array of alternate primary loyalties: religion, race, tribe, gang, and locality, among others. Around the world, the contest is going poorly for the state as a growing number of people shift their primary loyalty to one of the many alternatives, for which they are willing to fight.
— William S. Lind

Roach and many other American intellectuals, to the extent that they consider 4GW at all, misunderstand it as a question of killing bad guys. Thus their response to growing unrest across Mexico, with non-state actors defeating state forces in open battle, is to do what America always does:

As the cartels’ power grows under Mexico’s current left-wing leadership, it will increase the supply of drugs and violence here at home. This is unacceptable. The wall is a good and necessary thing, but we may be forced to take more active measures, such as sending drones and troops into Mexico to root out direct threats to our homeland.

In short, the Establishment response to widespread unrest and revolt in Mexico is to drop bombs on them. To kill all the bad guys. And not at all to do what can be done, if anything, to offset the delegitimization of the state that underlies the problem.
Did America stabilize Afghanistan or legitimize the Afghani government by dropping bombs there? How about Iraq, Syria? Anywhere? Bueller? If the problem in Mexico is that the state has lost its monopoly on violence because (in Lind’s words) it is losing legitimacy in the minds of its people, then dropping bombs on Mexico is the surest way to exacerbate the problem.
We will be killing innocents (this happens when you drop bombs) in the name of the Mexican government, which will further decrease the Mexican government’s legitimacy in the eyes of Mexicans. But we will also be making angry and inconsolable enemies of an entire people, millions of whom are already inside the United States.
Do you want 4GW, terror, and insurgency in the US? Because dropping bombs on Mexican children is the fastest way to get 4GW, terror, and insurgency in the US.
But there is a further point that Roach misses and which Lind hits on the head in the article linked from his quote: it is the legitimacy of the United States government that Americans ought to be most worried about. This is especially true as the Deep State, the Press, and the cultural Marxists in Congress work to remove the current President at all costs, especially the cost of the truth and the rule of law.
Once they have succeeded, they will have told the vast Red areas of America:

Your votes don’t matter, because even if you elect a President, we will drive him from office and reduce you to a silent serfdom. You and your views are entitled to no representation. You are and will remain ‘unpersons’

At that point there will remain no reason for those areas to support Washington. Or to feed New York and Los Angeles for that matter.
Fourth Generation war is real. It’s in full effect in Mexico. But our intellectuals fail to learn the most important lesson therefrom: the legitimacy of own national government should be our primary concern.
Or should we as individuals conclude that it is already illegitimate, then we should be preparing fiercely for the day when a critical mass of our fellow citizens concludes the same. Because the lessons of Mexico will be taught here on that day, whether Americans wish to learn them or not.