The Western nations, since the age of exploration and imperialism, have accustomed themselves to mastery over emergent, backward or broken nations, or primitive or failed empires.
They exercised over them a rule that ranged from the ruthless and exploitative to the paternalism of the latter-day colonialism of the 1920s to 1950s. They nominated their monarchs, offered them Western education and religion, and held out to them unconsidered and unfulfilled promises that someday they would be like their Western masters, possessing an imitation of Western ways of life and the prospect of distant graduation into their own version of the civilization practiced by the West.
Today the tables have been turned in the relations of imperialist victims and imperial rulers, but the nature of the relationship is changing into a new one of terrorization or victimization of the latter by the former.