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Overall a very solid comment. There is one particular point which I think actually goes a bit deeper into how most westerners view states/governments/counties, which I think is relevant to analyzing the middle east:
I think an assumption of the liberal view, really the dominant implicit western view, is that states/countries should be commonwealths. By that, I mean states should represent both the desires of the population and act in the interests of the population. A clear implication of this view of what a country is is nationalism: if the government is supposed to represent the people, the people have to be a community/nation. This can be defined in different ways: ethnocultural nationalism in historic Germany is one way and civic nationalism in the US and France another way (simplifying things). There are other ways to define a nation as well, and most nations are a mix of definitions to a degree.
Popular sovereignty was historically not how most states worked. In general, the modern view that sovereignty came from the people started with the Atlantic Revolutions from 1775-1825. There were historic exceptions, such as many Greek city states and the Romans, but the Enlightenment is where the modern ideology proximately arrived. In both Christendom and the Islamic world, relevantly including the Ottomans, sovereignty came from god to the sovereign. The Sultan was just your boss, and unless you overthrew him that was that.
Ironically enough, this allowed a lot more cultural diversity than the commonwealth model gives. In the commonwealth model, since the nation is sovereign you have to define the nation and, to a greater or lesser extent, force everyone to identify with the nation and culturally adhere to certain national values. "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." is a great quote about this. Same with the French eradicating their minority languages in the 1800s. If the Sultan/King is your boss, you don't need to go through those steps; just pledge loyalty to them, and you can identify/care about whomever you want. The millet system in the Ottoman empire was a great example of this; the different religions basically got to live in parallel societies, so long as they submitted to the Sultan.
This was the environment that most of the middle east came from. It went from loyalty to the sovereign, be it the Ottoman Sultan, Iranian Shah, or whomever, to trying to make commonwealths out of these states. The problem was simple: with few exceptions, the peoples of the new nations hated each other way more than they had any incentive to cooperate. While you got some 'successful' nation states, like Turkey and Iran, most states really are just some subset of the population, such as Saddam's tribesmen in Iraq or until recently Alawites in Syria, basically dominating the rest. Rhetoric aside, you have the old 'separate communities united by loyalty to the Sovereign' with the sovereign being a local potentate. I'll also note that the creates of the 'successful' nation states often involved horrific violence: Turkey being the obvious example.
Tying all of the above together, the liberals are correct that much of the middle east is an example if failed nation building. The issue with their viewpoint is that it assume the nation/commonwealth model is the best and universal model, when really that's not the case. Creating a nation is hard, involves forced conformity into the national ideal, and often involves pretty savage oppression and violence. Instead of a commonwealth government, maybe the better path would be trying to find the least offensive ersatz-king and promoting them would be the best way to promote the welfare of both middle easterners and those who deal with them. Nationalism/popular sovereignty actually demands a lot of a people, psychologically, materially, and socially, and for most of the middle east it seems the juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
This is a segue, but I think the lesson here also applies to the west to a degree. Many groups want to simultaneously tear down culturally the notion of a shared community, while still asking the inhabitants to consider each other as part of a shared community and act accordingly. I think this contradiction causes a lot of the political and social conflicts we see in the west today, although tbh wealth anesthetizes things over so it may remain a relatively minor deal.
Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.
You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.
I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.
I agree with the notion that all humans do owe each other some things. Off the top of my head, non-aggression and a degree of respect for one example. I this all national identities, both ethnic and civic, are contingent on history and convenience. I don't think a global identity is any more or any less invalid philosophically than a national identity from first principles. I think that internationalism has actually had a decent amount of success both materially, pax-Americana has been the best time to be alive in human history, and ethically, most people agree in the value of the international community to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, I think nations are a Chesterton's fence that we should be careful about rapidly changing, now that they exist.
I think the problem comes as follows: what happens when the interests of yourself/your family/whatever relevant community you are a part of conflict with those of the nation or, in this case, the human race?
Ever single nation has had to deal with that question: there are always parts of the nation that get elevated and other parts that get shafted. It can be as personal as sacrificing your wellbeing in a war for that of a nation, or as abstract/community based as your language being suppressed like in the case of Occitan vs French or your religion being seen as seditious or semi-seditious such as in the Kulturkampf in Germany or Catholicism to many regimes in France. I think the recent surge of the populist right is less about a pro-active increase in national sentiment and more about subsets of different nations feeling culturally and/or economically shafted by the recent economic and social changes in their countries.
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The reason I feel it's doomed is because a shared group identity, a "us", can only exist in a contrast against a "them", otherwise it's amorphous and fails to inspire. Which is why I believe a united earth will only realistically happen when there will be something else for it to be contrasted against, be it other human colonies or aliens.
Could the 'them' be Nature, which has beset us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys, struck down half of our children from the dawn of time until two centuries ago, and, if Charles Murray's observations are accurate, is an unrepentant racist to boot?
Human efforts to bring Nature to heel: arrogant hubris, or the Moral Equivalent of War?
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