Rich Lowry of National Review magazine began an article today with these stunning words:
"The United States is not just the world's sole superpower, it is the world's only responsible power."
In this world of muticulturalism, of the West's wallowing in its self-doubt and self-hatred, such a sentence comes as a splash of cold water on a half-awake face. The question is, is Lowry right?
Lowry talks about France's most recent diplomatic double-cross, but then moves on to say:
Civilization simply lacks backbone without the United States in the lead. Everyone agrees that a nuclear North Korea is a danger, but Russia and China play the role of enablers. Everyone thinks the same about Iran, but Europe is willing only to dither. Everyone thinks Iraq descending into chaos would be a disaster, but only the U.S. is pouring major resources into preventing it (granted, it’s our baby). Everyone supports the Afghan war, and NATO is actually pitching in there, but the Taliban is emboldened on the assumption that our European allies won’t have the same commitment to doing the job that we do.
This is not to say that the U.S. is flawless. Our mistakes, however, tend to be the products of an excess of zeal and idealism. We don’t do coldblooded calculation well. Some of this is the product of being a superpower — dishonest diplomatic ploys are beneath us. Some of it is the nature of our democracy, which values openness and honesty. // [Aside: I think a good bit of it lies also in the Christian conscience that still survives more here than elsewhere]
Paranoid critics charge that we are in Iraq to control its oil. The French could have pulled off such a self-serving maneuver clothed in idealism, but we are in Iraq for exactly the achingly innocent reasons we say. We are spending and bleeding there trying to plant a liberal democracy in the hardscrabble soil of Mesopotamia.
When President Bush is gone, conservative foreign policy will change. But it won’t be a change the foreign-policy establishment likes. It won’t be toward a let’s-talk-even-more-to-the-French multilateralism as represented by Nebraska’s tiresome Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. It will be something more selfish and hardheaded, something more French in its motivation — Bush without the soft touches. Then, the world will miss the earnest do-gooding United States of old. [Aside: I'm not sure what Lowry foresees, but it doesn't sound good! But maybe our patience and idealism have limits.]