World Growing Up

Assuming with St Augustine that history is the education of the human race in the same developmental stages as human beings experience as they grow up.--
Africa is still in tribal chaos, unable to get its gods together, like Egypt before its faith unification was massively symbolized by the pyramids. (The infancy stage in the education of the human race.).
Extreme Islamists, particularly the Taliban, are using the force of faith to unify and enter the childhood stage -- Romulus and Remus fed by the mother wolf, little boys fighting on the playground that became the Roman Empire.
Iraq found temporary unity under Saddam Hussein, and again as America seeks to replace him with unifying force of temporary colonization and democratic politicalization, comparable to British colonization of divided tribal areas like India (and Iraq before Saddam).
Iran is seeking unity after decolonization by moving into premature adult technological modernity like China, hindered by demographic religious divisions in its people still in infancy stage and political divisions in its people in the adolescent stage seeking the order of democracy to replace its authoritarian past.
Great Britain is struggling to enter a mature European Union society hindered by people demographically divided between wealth-dominated modernity and regressive semi-feudal parliamentary government.
America is struggling to overcome regressive post industrial wealth and corporate domination of its adult technological modernity and government, hindered by a regressive political division between change driven by the development of the human mind in the education of the human race and special interests that benefit from the status quo and are supported by regressive financial imperialism and regressive religious faiths and organizations.
China found unity by military force based on political ideology to dispense with infancy, childhood, and adolescent stages to enter an American-style adult post industrial modernity dominated by government rather than corporate money-power.
The European Union is trying to fashion a mature confederation with a sustainable social infrastructure that brings together very diverse nations with different languages and cultures that need a unifying faith in a better society than the world has seen.