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economic and political reforms that allowed peasants to own land, sue in court, mortgage their property for entrepreneurial value, and operate legal businesses instead of working through shadowy black markets. The rival group was called the "Shining Path", a terrorist network that tried to assassinate Hernando on multiple occasions.

By identifying the underlying causes of why people join terrorist groups like the KKK and Shining Path, Stetson Kennedy and Hernando de Soto did something that most nation-states haven't done, they defeated terrorism.

The situation for Middle Eastern terrorism is far more complex than either of those two examples allow. While some authors have blamed U.S. corporations, the reality is that U.S. corporations have had little play in the Middle East. It is true that U.S. corporations done harmful things all over the world. However, it is just as true that they bring 200 billion dollars a year in foreign direct investment, they bring jobs to developing nations, and inexpensive goods. The states with the highest rising GDPs are closely linked to U.S. trade and investment, so this would be a hard source to claim as the inspiration for terrorism in the Middle East.

The Middle East faces the same problem that many other nation-states have faced in the past, one that our founding fathers fretted about greatly. In a nation-state, a majority could impose a tyranny on a minority. A "mobocracy", to use their terminology. The nation-states of the Middle East consist of easy resources, which leads their governments to shun developing human capital like in less resource blessed nations like Japan and Switzerland. The group which claims these resources gets to impose its will on the rest of the population, so it is almost ubiquitously across the Middle East.

The solution lies in the U.S. halting its current foreign policy that it inherited from people like Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, and Irving Kristol. While this won't solve the intrastate problems of terrorism inherent in regimes like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, or Syria, it will make the U.S. a less viable target while hostilities are localized to the conflicts of those countries. As in the previous two cases, domestic terrorism requires domestic solutions.

Learn more about this author, Michael Soileau.
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