Pulp Western as Power Politics primer

In a PoliSci class I took my Freshman Year at BYU the Professor had the Louis L’Amour book “The Empty Land” on the assigned reading list.  We all thought that was odd.  Why would we be reading a pulp Western?

Well this morning as I was browsing the various news sites that I check I came across this article in Der Speigel which if you’ve read the “Empty Land” you completely understand. (In case the artricle no longer exists I grabbed a PDF copy: Der Spiegel-Obama-PowerPolitics

L’Amour may have used the renegade Frontier American West as a backdrop but the story is a primer on the use of Power Politics and how being a nice guy (the title of the Der Spiegel article is “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage”) in the face of  of others self interest will get you no where.