The Serenity Prayer as Foreign Policy

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Most of us are familiar with the Serenity Prayer but I'd never thought of it as a kind of guide to foreign policy until I read blog post by Rod Dreher.  Here's the link to the entire post:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-serenity-prayer-as-a-guide-to-national-security-policy/

With turmoil everywhere from Mali to Syria to Iraq and Nigeria, the United States can't solve everyone's problems.  Some how we must determine what we can do and what we cannot do. With the instant 24/7 communications that we have today, it is hard to turn away from the vast amount of suffering in the world today. I think the first step is simply not to make a bad situation worse. Then to realistically determine if we can make the situation better and if so, we need to count the cost before we go plunging in.  (We could certainly have avoided a world of hurt if we had applied this to Iraq but we all know my soapbox on Iraq,...)