The "Improbable" Artificial State Has One More Anniversary

The United States is unique--exceptional, if you will--in a number of ways.  Among these arguably the most important is the fundamental reality that it is a totally artificial state.  A second unique feature, arguably almost on a par with the first, is that the US is that rare bird, a state which has created a nation.

As a nation and as a polity, We the People, each and every one of us, is part of a purely artificial state.  We are defined not by borders per se nor by language.  We are not defined by religious confession, pace the large number of Christians who would wish it otherwise.

What defines us as a state and thus as a nation is a set of ideas.  That basement truth is what makes us both artificial and exceptional.  We are the product of that most ineffable and powerful entity--the intellect.  Founded on ideas, the ideas became our foundation.  Over time the memes by which Americans see and understand themselves have both remained fixed and highly mutable, evolving with changes in our size, our complexity, the shifting sands of science and technology, the alterations of our demographics, the creative destruction of our economy while staying unaltered in all the essentials, the cornerstones of thinking so often expressed in simple, almost buzzword terms: democracy, transparency, rule of law, separation of church and state, equality of opportunity, free enterprise, and so on.

The fact that we are citizens of a set of ideas made manifest in human structures and institutions usually flies below our personal and political radar.  Having been born and raised in this crowd sourced set of ideas, we are as unaware of its central and crucial nature as is the fish of the water in which it swims.  It takes the perspective of either the immigrant or of having returned to the US after a long absence abroad to awaken the consciousness, to become aware of just how faint and fragile the foundations of our collective enterprise actually are--and how powerful a force they effect upon us.

The existence, let alone the flourishing of the US has been termed "improbable" as far back as the end of the Nineteenth Century as the US emerged on the global stage for the first time.  Foreign observers, men of rank, power and learning saw the reality of the American experience with a clarity which eluded most Americans.  They saw the artificial nature of the US as both a great strength and an awesome source of potential weakness.

The strengths were self-evident.  The artificial nature of the US, its foundations being ideas, provided a haven for all, a safe harbor for all those ideas and individuals seen as too dangerous to be tolerated in the states of Europe founded on language, customs, borders, the verdicts of ancient wars.  The US was by its nature imbued with a degree of flexibility, a willingness to experiment, to take a chance far beyond any European country.  As the US and its people were defined by ideas and not by the accidents of precedent or ancestry there were more rewards for trying something new, for striking out in a new direction, for doing things differently.  At the same time the citizens of this artificial state and nation held onto the basics, the foundational principles with a rigor and a zeal almost beyond European comprehension.

The weaknesses were not so apparent, but were equally real.  One very important weakness which arose directly from our foundation as an intellectual artifact was uncertainty as to what it took to be a "real" American.

The US was caught in a never ending crisis of identity.  Being founded on ideas and having a population representing virtually every nation on Earth, We the People always wondered "who are we?"  At the core, what did it mean to be an American?  The endemic identity crisis peaked in epidemic outbreaks from time to time over the course of our history.  Recurrent waves of anti-immigrant sentiment represented a manifestation of this.  So also did the episodic outbreaks of religious frenzy.  Hyper-patriotism thrived periodically as we sought to reassure ourselves regarding our identity.

Another, closely related weakness was our uncertainty as to how and when we should have relations with other countries.  It had always been a given that the US would seek cordial commercial relations with all other states.  In this orientation we Americans showed ourselves to be the citizens of a maritime power, a state which sought the broadest possible networks of trade.  Beyond that one element there has never been a long lasting consensus on the role of the US in the world.  Isolationist or interventionist represent just two poles in the America foreign policy dilemma.  Idealism or realism are the verbal flags marking two other extremes in the foreign relations conundrum which grows from the artificial nature of the US.

The never ending swings between idealism and realism in our foreign policy as well as the equally drastic swings between withdrawal and engagement with the world both come from the unique, artificial nature of the US.  In a real sense our history shows that the US lacks permanent friends and enemies.  In this way we are not exceptional.  But, our history also shows that the US does not have many permanent interests.  Indeed, beyond free trade there is no present day national interest which can be traced back much beyond the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

Lasting interests are the necessary products of states which do not have identity crises.  Lasting interests are defined as are the states which have them--by experience, usually that of ancient wars.  A sharp reminder of this dynamic and its difference from the forces at work in the US can be seen in the opposing ways in which many Mexicans and the majority of Americans see the war between their two countries.  To the Americans the affray of more than a century and a half ago is a null referent.  To the Mexicans it was a defining experience, a national humiliation the stain of which lingers on to the present moment.  The demand by so many Mexican apologists for a more "liberal" immigration policy on the part of the US is really an attempt to rewrite the verdict of a war most Americans are unaware of having taken place.

Because we are a state and a nation defined by ideas, ideas which are both unchanging and ever mutating we Americans fail to see just how long and complex the task of "nation-building" actually is.  We can blithely assume that since our defining ideas and the institutions which grow from them are and have been so successful, other people in other countries will want to adopt them wholesale just as soon as they are informed.  It was this simple assumption that propelled George W. Bush and his fellow neocons into the misguided and wrongheaded effort to transform Afghanistan and remake Iraq, not some perverse and evil impulse.  It might be noted that most of We the People thought the same until enough time and American corpses showed the error of the underlying assumption.

When the interventionary impulse leads to failure as it so often has, the reaction is withdrawal.  The American isolationist sentiment is predicated just as is our interventionary equivalent upon the defining ideas of the US.  Both are expressions of moral sentiments which reside deeply in our collective understanding of both our past and our present nature.  Moral sentiments ranging from being the shining city on the hill to its opposite, the cavalry riding to the rescue of the innocents threatened by external, violent evil are part, a central part, of our self-understanding, our collective self-definition.  We are doomed to continue to repeat the cycle of engage and disengage as we are that of being "realistic" only to turn "idealistic."

But our greatest weakness as an artifact of the minds of men is the potential to lose faith in our collective self, our shared institutions and structures, our capacity to shape our future.  The American identity is subject to seismic shocks.  Should one or a combination of those shocks result in a loss of faith in ourselves and our collective capacities, the result would be fatal to the American experiment.

The blame-America-first crowd along with those who celebrate cultural relativism threaten the American faith.  The constant refrain chanted by the tireless throats of these two groups which has pervaded so much of our collective consciousness for the past three decades is like water dripping on rock, slowly eroding, gradually corroding the solid and indestructible boulder to a handful of sand and mud.  Taken in the present context of war weariness, frustration with an implacable enemy addicted to terror, and the fear provoked by economic catastrophe looming, the soul sapping effects of the naysayers in our midst represent a very real challenge to the nature of the US and We the People.

We often give credit to ideas, particularly the ideas on which we are founded; we call them "powerful" and "eternal."  And so they can be.  It is also true that there is nothing more fragile and quick to flee than an idea.  Or a state and a nation founded simply and solely on ideas.

The Otherworldly Realism of T-Paw

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty is stuck in the second tier of Republican hopefuls despite a strenuous effort to break to daylight.  He has already taken a definite stand on matters economic with strong support from the media and no palpable result in the public polling.  Now he is trying to do the same in the area of foreign affairs, putting distance between himself and the neo-isolationists of the GOP on the one hand and the neocons of the George W. Bush days on the other.

T-paw's essay in self-definition came yesterday n a speech delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations.  While represented as a tour of the horizon, the candidate focused on the Mideast, Israel, and Obama's failures of policy in the region.

There is little doubt but the Obama approach to affairs in the Mideast specifically and the world generally have been marked by far more failure than success.  The primary reason for this is to be found in the world view of the Nice Young Man From Chicago with its blame-America-first core.  Being a perfect academic, Mr Obama is given to avoiding action in favor of words whenever possible.  Then as a matter of personality, the Clueless Guy in the Oval resembles a Pearson's Puppeteer.

(For those of you who do not read science fiction, the Pearson Puppeteer was an alien species created by the fertile mind of Larry Niven.  The species is characterized by a degree of caution which surpasses the merely cowardly.  The "leader" of the Puppeteers is called the Hindmost--which rather resembles in concept the idea of "leading from behind" offered recently by a member of the administration in admiring tribute to Obama's presumed statesmanship in the Libyan Affair.)

The characterization of Mr Obama's approach(es) to the "Arab Spring" and the Israeli-Palestinian Question offered by Governor Pawlenty are unexceptional.  So also is his emphasis on the importance of Israel to US national interests.

Where T-paw misses the cliched bus is in his fervently expressed belief in the ability of the US to act effectively in the creation of freedom and democracy in the Mideast in the wake of the recent and ongoing tumult.  He is of the view that authentic democracy, genuine freedom, real Western style government with full fledged protections of minorities including women and non-Muslims can be created and maintained over time with the assistance and support of the US.

It would be very nice if the Pawlenty vision was accurate.  It is not.  Whether dealing with the environment of post-authoritarian Egypt or Tunisia, or contemplating how "reforms" might be facilitated by American efforts in kingdoms such as Jordan, Morocco or, most importantly of all, Saudi Arabia, Mr Pawlenty discounts the force and universality of Islam, particularly the form of Islam embraced and promoted by Salifists and Wahhibists.

The well-meaning Pawlenty (or his advisers and speechwriters) ignore the fundamental realities of Islamic thought which focus upon the deity as the source of all legitimate law.  Also overlooked is the oft-repeated meme that neither democracy nor liberty as understood in the West is compatible with the dictates of the deity contained in the sacred literature as interpreted by generations of scholars of Islamic jurisprudence.  The Pawlenty stance also overlooks the fundamental orientation of Islam on the duties of the believer.  Not to put an inaccurately fine point on the matter, Islam elevates duty, duty to the deity over any and all personal rights. In short there is no concept of individual rights which equates in any way with the prevalent definitions of rights and responsibilities in the US or the West generally.

The failure to comprehend accurately the impact of faith and its all-inclusive nature constitutes the rock on which Mr Pawlenty's ideas of constructive engagement with the new forces of the Arab states must founder.  While the people oriented toward secular concerns and world view dominated and continue to dominate the media coverage of events in the Arab states, these folk are a minority, even an endangered species.  Many of the more secular minded are quite aware of this aspect of the post-authoritarian dynamic as is seen with the repeated calls in Egypt for a delay in the elections so as to allow the secularists to organize well enough to take on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist political groups.

Mr Pawlenty's call for the next president to motivate the Saudi royal house to take the path of reform is also quite otherworldly.  The House of Saud exists today because of the bargain made generations ago to link its fortunes with those of the Wahhibists.  There is no way on this Earth that the austere world view of Wahhibism would continence let alone participate in any sort of reform such as mentioned by T-paw.  There is no chance that the Wahhibist theology is about to go along with extending any rights to non-Muslims or see the error of Mohammad's ways regarding the status of women.

In his remarks Mr Pawlenty warns against the elections which produce results antithetical to genuine democracy, authentic freedom.  He may have had Iran in mind when he said this as there is no better example of a people committing political suicide at the ballot box than that.  It will take far more than support for the "reform" movement of 2009 for the verdict of self-destruction by vote to be reversed.  The Iranians willingly and to the later regret of some surrendered all vestiges of political autonomy to the dictates of theology.  The same may happen in at least some of the Arab states celebrated as having sounded the tocsin of freedom by Mr Pawlenty.

A central point made by the presidential aspirant deserved more emphasis.  The reality of political Islam, particularly violent political Islam will be with us for many, many years to come.  As long as that reality existss the US will be the major target of its hate and violence.  This status will not be removed even if the US were to unilaterally withdraw from every last member state of the Organization of the Islamic Conference--or even if the US were to vote for the dissolution of Israel.

The necessary conclusion is the US must not retreat to some sort of Fortress America.  Surrender to violent political Islam is not an option simply because surrender will not work.  It will not immunize the US against future attacks, future terror, future war.  Nothing short of every last American--all 312 million of us--facing east and banging our foreheads on the floor would grant immunity from the hatred of the groups dedicated to violent political Islam.

The US may have, as Mr Pawlenty suggested, one political party which argues for American decline, withdrawal, disengagement and isolation.  He thinks that there is no need for a second.  He is right.  He would have been even more on target had he said that one such party is one too many.

A Manic-Depressive Polity

In the individual the states of mania and depression can cycle in a matter of weeks or days, even hours.  The collection of individuals known as a society, or as a political actor, a polity, being larger takes longer.  Still the result is the same, a cycling from the peaks of mania to the depths of depressive despair.  Ten years represents the cycle length for We the People.

Ten years ago the majority of We the People were exploring the delightful high country of collective mania.  The dot com bust having been weathered with surprisingly little broad gauge effects, a sense of hyper confidence in both today and tomorrow had taken hold.  It may not have been the unlimited sort of let-the-good-times-roll mood which typified the highest point of the Sixties, but it ran a close second.  The economy was not just sound, it was rip-roaringly good.  The impact of outsourcing had not yet spread through the ranks of potentially unemployed.  The housing bubble was inflating rapidly driven by a mix of ill-advised governmental actions and the nice, old fashioned greed of financial institutions.  Jobs, money, liquidity, the notion of one's home as an ATM with two bathrooms were all abroad in the land.

The US was at peace.  Or so we thought, being tone deaf regarding the hostile religious music tooting through sections of the Mideast.  Islam was simply one more religion, not the source of terror and war it would become.  The president, George W. Bush, promised a foreign policy based upon both American leadership and strength and a concomitant "humility."  Strong but meek constituted a view of our role in global affairs which rang well and true with most of We the People.

American preeminence, American leadership, and American restraint were seen as both appropriate and laudable by the majority of us.  There was no question regarding the truth of "American exceptionalism."  We were on a roll both globally and at home.  There were no problems we could not solve.  No challenges we could not meet almost without effort.

Flash forward a decade.  Actually it is necessary to move the calender only eight years.  The euphoria of mania was gone.  Instead of the high of confidence, certainty, the sense of being divinely protected, divinely motivated, We the People now wallowed in the slough of despair.  We were beaten, defeated, and broke.

The bubble of economic confidence had shattered into even more pieces than had the housing bubble.  Net worth plummeted for many.  An unconscionable number were unemployed, many having become so discouraged by prospects that they had surrendered the task of seeking employment, leaving the jobless job market completely.  Two long wars had come to nothing.  There was no sense of victory as there had been no reality of success in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  At the same time, the institutional reaction to the very real threats of Islamic terrorism had created a permanent empire of fear.

A trip to the airport had become for many a visit to hell's anteroom.  Security warnings, the loudly announced arrests of yet another wannabe Muslim martyr, the periodic successes of those who shout "Allahu akbar" as they pulled the trigger or pushed the clicker, the pervasive awareness of terror's dark shadow blocked the sunny nature of American society to a significant extent.

Then there was our domestic elite.  You know the legions of our self-appointed best and brightest, the shining lights of politics, the media, academia.  The constant refrain from all these fine folks--including the president of the United States, a academic and political elitist of the first water--was that We the People and our country were in decline, a deserved decline.  We were told by both word and deed that if there was such a thing as "American exceptionalism" it was only negative.

Our "betters" of the hoi olligoi assured us that other cultures were every bit as good and meritorious as our own.  We were told that Islam--a religion where there was authority for the stoning of women, the murder of homosexuals, the existence of a permanent state of war with all infidels, the use of lies to mislead those who were not Muslim--was every bit as moral as all other belief systems.  Against the evidence of the senses and logic, our "betters" hectored us to the effect that those Muslims who bombed, who stoned, who flew jet airliners into buildings, who used eight year olds as bomb mules, were not really, really Islamic but rather "misunderstanders" or 'hijackers" of the faith.

The economy was in the tank.  The combination of outsourcing, of moving manufacturing offshore to, primus inter pares, China, very poorly conceived and executed government programs and policies, and, not least, the inability or unwillingness of many within We the People to answer creatively a single question, "how much is enough?" put the domestic economy down for the count.

Years of practicing the very politics of self-destruction, governments of both parties had competed in bribing the polity with federal give aways subsidies, and tax cuts.  The combination was, as had been predicted by not only practitioners of the dismal science--economics--but all those of relatively clear vision, fatal to the federal budget and provided the killing deficit.  Financial collapse bred economic collapse which in turn made the deficit crunch lurch to the very verge of terminal collapse.

And still the wars lingered on.  By the end of the decade which started on 9/11/01 the US was by and large out of Iraq--although this June has been the most deadly for our forces in over two years.  We know that the sacrifices of irreplaceable lives and hundreds of billions of (hopefully) recoverable dollars has bought nothing worth the price.  Iraq is caught in ever increasing sectarian violence with Shiites killing Sunnis in wholesale lots in Anbar province.  Bombs and snipers compete for attention in Baghdad.  The government is caught in stasis, a stasis of sectarianism and personal rivalry.  The only point where the majority agree is that Americans are bad and Iranians are good.

In Afghanistan the strategic morass had resolved itself sufficiently to show that the combination of nocturnal raids and constant pressure was working on the military level to progressively reduce the will and ability of Taliban and the Haqqani network to wage war.  At the same time all of the nation-building efforts have proven a failure.  The government and its security forces remain inept, corrupt, and monuments to inefficiency and illegitimacy.  What Taliban and the rest are losing on the battlefield, they are recouping with interest on the governmental level.

The totality of the Afghanistan GDP less three percent is provided by American and other foreign origin military and economic aid.  The vast tsunami of money coupled with a lack of financial oversight has given the endemic culture of corruption a massive boost.  This, in turn, has reduced the appeal of both the central government and its foreign sponsors to the average Afghan--particularly if he has not been able to grasp a handful of the goodies as they flowed by.

Last week President Obama delivered the most sickening speech ever heard or read by the Geek.  His we-have-been-bested in Afghanistan remarks were a potpourri of lies and half truths which beggar description and surpass imagination.  Even though he has committed the US to withdrawing its forces prematurely, this was not enough for others within his elite company.  Nancy Pelosi, a not inconsiderable presence even after last November's election, has demanded an even faster schedule of pull out.  In this she has been joined by a number of deficit hawk Republicans.

There is no doubt that the majority of We the People want out of Afghanistan ASAP!  The absence of success, even the absence of a plausible reason for our continued presence could have no other effect.  The Obama administration like its predecessor has never articulated a plausible, rational, understandable set of reasons for our continued efforts in Afghanistan.  Often proclaimed the "good war" or the "necessary war," the US and its allies have never stated a clear goal for our operations, instead producing loads of fine sounding but vapid mood music about democracy, good government, stability, and human rights.

The mood music about Afghanistan as was the case with the identical sounds regarding Iraq have never been believable to or believed by many, even most, of We the People.  Without saying so in a direct, blunt way, it is clear that We  the People have not and do not trust the so-called elite to be honest with us concerning intentions and results in these wars.  The distrust felt by so many of us came forth regarding a military commitment in Libya.  We may have been quite sympathetic with the rebels and their goal of ridding their country of the noxious Gaddafi family, but there was no way we would put our people in harm's way on the behalf of the rebels.

Had Obama or his predecessor been true leaders, they would have put forth believable reasons for our efforts in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Libya.  The failure of each to undertake this basic presidential task successfully joined with the shocks of economic collapse and the reality of the never ending threat of terror to erode the manic mood of decade's beginning.

There is one more reason for the awesome mood shift of the past ten years.  The result of the years of indoctrination in the American educational system from pre-school to grad school.  The blame-America-first generation which emerged from the Sixties has controlled the public educational system for two decades and more now.  The repeated message, built into curricula and handbooks of instructions is and has been profoundly anti-American in its orientation.  The end result is a large and growing segment of We the People is predisposed to think the worst about their country, their government, and the actions of both, past and present alike.

Millions of minds have been conditioned by twelve and more years of education to believe the US had much to apologize for.  The same minds believe the US is not capable of doing good for itself or others in the world.  At the same time they have been oriented to reject the notions of national or cultural exceptionalism--or even superiority.  The US is simply one country among many, no better than any--and worse, much worse than most.  In a real and basic sense there are millions in our midst who have been raised to believe that we deserve nothing but failure and defeat as redress for our earlier sins, our previous arrogance, our long standing exploitation of others.

The synergy between elite and the common folk is perfect.  The elite, a product of the same blame-America-first orientation as their slightly younger non-elite fellow citizens has preached and lectured, exhorted and hectored on the subject of American wrong doing, American unexceptionalism, American exploitation, the beauties of the multicultural and multilateral, the evils of going it alone, of acting to protect and advance national interest.  The success achieved over the past years is attributable not to the persuasiveness or inherent truth of the message but rather to the propensity of the auditors, the children of the past thirty or forty years to believe what they hear and read.

The US and We the People have faced threats and challenges equaling or surpassing those today.  In the past we have not surrendered to either.  We have not succumbed to depression before.  It is different today simply because the "kids" of the Sixties particularly those who were activists of one sort or another became successful beyond their wildest dreams when they took over the educational system of the US over the course of twenty years.  Because of this success, the victory of the blame-America-first ideology, We the People now have lost confidence not only in our institutions and actions but in our very selves.  We no longer trust ourselves and our ability to handle life's challenges and threats.

When looking at the palpable decline of the US, at the national nadir of depression, the old saying of Pogo is more true than ever before--"We have met the enemy and he is us."

What A Difference A Decade Makes

Ten years ago a group of nineteen men primarily from Saudi Arabia were in the last stages of preparing for their dramatic exit from this world.  In the US the major political news revolved around the Social Security "lockbox" and dire warnings of dark conspiracy afoot with Vice-President Cheney's energy task force meeting behind locked doors.  The most recently completed Quadrennial Defense Review was silent on asymmetrical warfare and made little mention of unmanned combat systems (UCS.)  The "Gang of Five Hundred" had reached a quick consensus on George W. Bush being a one-term president.

And, the US was rolling in bucks.  The federal budget was running an embarrassingly large surplus.  There was so much loot in Uncle Sam's pockets that tax cuts were agreed by one and all to be a very good idea.  There was also a wide consensus on the desirability of increased spending on education and health care for senior citizens.  Americans were feeling almost guilty about all that money littering the floors and vaults of the Treasury Department.

The overall American mood was optimistic.  There was a degree of buoyancy within We the People that even the boom days of the early and mid-sixties seemed grey and dismal in comparison.  The "go-go" years of that famed decade paled into dimness compared with the confidence, even exuberance, seen on Wall Street and Main Street alike.  The Summer of '01 was very much a period of "let the good times roll!"

The US was the globe's only superpower.  The economy was booming in all sectors--even housing and real estate.  Jobs were plentiful.  There were no real enemies abroad in the world, only a handful of annoying Arab terrorists such as those who attacked the USS Cole and our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  Hardly enough to worry about, right?

We now know that the Summer of '01 was the last season of the ancien regime.  We know now that the past decade has been the opening period of several rather revolutionary dynamics in national security and foreign affairs.

The concept of asymmetrical warfare has come front and center.  The US and other civilized states now must prepare to deter or defeat opponents at any point on a conflict spectrum which runs from the use of terror to the employment of missile delivered nuclear and thermonuclear weapons.

The introduction and very rapid evolution of unmanned combat systems (UCS) whether in the air, on land, or in and under the sea indicates that the new technology bodes well to be a game changer equivalent in impact to the introduction of gunpowder weapons.  There can be no doubt that even in this early stage of development, the UCS far surpasses in impact both current and near term potential of the submarine, the aircraft carrier, or aircraft themselves.

The nation-state which has served to define global politics for the past five hundred years is now threatened on two fronts.  One of these is the supra-national organization.  The other can be best seen as sub-national or, to use a longer term, national entities living uneasily within the confines of a state dominated by a different and larger nation.

Another feature which has come to the center of global politics is the latest restatement of a very long standing conflict.  It is a conflict which has emerged many times over the centuries.  The defining foundation of this very ancient and basic tension is between philosophies of life which center on the individual and views which put the priority upon the community and see the individual as important only insofar as he contributes to the common good of the community.

The tension between individualism and communitarianism dates back to the time when agriculture emerged as a rival to the far more ancient hunting and gathering way of life.  To be successful the agriculture based approach to life requires stable communities in which land and labor can be monitored, controlled, guaranteed.  The hunting and gathering economy depends upon the voluntary cooperation of individuals so that every person's strengths can be utilized and their weaknesses offset.  Agriculture requires both the subordination of the individual to the needs of the community and a hierarchy to assure this subordination.

The individualistically oriented view of life emphasizes the rights of the individual while properly linking these rights with concomitant duties.  The communitarian understanding puts a great weight on the duties of the individual--often to the point of ignoring the concept of "rights" completely.  The polities which tend to the individualistic end of the spectrum are open and democratic to a significant degree.  Polities which lean in the communitarian direction are authoritarian, even autocratic.

In the past, the conflict between the individualistic and communitarian has been seen in the wars between Western democracies and authoritarian ideologically driven states such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  It was the conflict of world views and understandings which hid under the term, "the Cold War."  Today it exists as the struggle between civilized states and the exponents of violent political Islam.

Running as a connecting thread between all of these several substantial and rapid changes in the practice of global politics is the equally fast and major transformation of the technologies of information transmission and communication.  As a means for facilitating the organization of ad hoc constituencies or as a tool for perception manipulation or as a political force multiplier, the Internet, the cellphone, and their dependencies such as social media have only begun to demonstrate their power and potential quite recently.

Then there is the change in the way in which We the People see ourselves, the world, and our future.  In a very important sense, the change in mood and perception during the past decade is also a revolution.  Perhaps it is the most important revolution of all.  This contention is predicated on a commonplace: The perceptions, attitudes, and, thus, actions of the American public place very real and powerful inducements and constraints on decision and policy makers.    In short, the mood of Americans generally is the context in which all national security and foreign policy actions are taken (or not taken.)

(It has gotten too bloody hot to go on for now--105 degrees F here at the computer. Please indulge the Geek and let him go and cool off secure in the knowledge that he will go on with this "thought piece" on the morrow when it might be a tad cooler.)

The Devil Lives In The Endgame

"It ain't over till it's over" and "It ain't over until the fat lady sings" may be cliches but both have the advantage of expressing self-evident truths.  Nowhere are these truths more obvious than in states experiencing violent political unrest or that plus the add-on of foreign military intervention.  Currently there are three places (one hesitates to call all three states) where the US is involved in endgames--or, at least, what the administration hopes constitutes such.

Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen are all in what it is hoped by decision makers throughout the West but particularly inside the Beltway to be entering the last chapter of their narratives of violent political unrest.  There is no doubt but the people of the US and its allied states are war weary.  It is increasingly difficult to muster and maintain support for any further involvement in the messy internal affairs of majority Muslim areas.  Not even the dire warnings regarding the AQAP will stimulate any feelings of alarm in We the People.  Libya has stalemate and lack of purpose written all over it.  Afghanistan is a write off in the minds of many--all the more so since the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The Afghanistan conflict is the only one in which any significant number of Americans is involved.  This means it is the only one where we can take decisive action.  The action most desired by many in both public and congress is an accelerated withdrawal.  The arguments in favor of this are powerful.  We have accomplished the main goal of our invasion--the death of bin Laden and the virtual destruction of al-Qaeda.  The Afghan government remains inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and a frightful waste of American money.

The Karzai regime wants to hinder our most effective operational concepts whether night raids or the use of tactical air power.  At the same time he is resistant, to say the least, to our requirements that he clean up his house, work harder in the old governance reform thing, concentrate more on developing the Afghan National Force to the level where it can assume security duties on its own.  On top of that, he and all those around him appear to be complete ingrates considering the billions of dollars and nearly two thousand lives we have expended in large measure to support the existence of his government free of extremist control.

From the American perspective it seems the Vietnam Syndrome is back in play.  Congress using the deficit and federal budget constraints as justification will proceed to write-off the American lives and demand a firm timetable for total American withdrawal.  It, and, in essence, We the People, will declare our losses in fisc and lives to have been a poor idea and move to cut our losses, ignore the remaining and threatening loose ends left hanging in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and turn our collective eyes inward once again.

Regardless of what Secretary of Defense Gates said the other day in Singapore, this will introduce yet one more era of neo-isolationism.  There are more than a few within us who have surrendered Great Power status to the Chinese.  Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) whose district includes Camp Lejune is a potent opponent of the war in Afghanistan as he was that in Iraq.  The NYT points out that Jones is no longer a "pariah" in the party or unpopular in the district which he has represented since 1994.  This means the Republican neo-isolationist wing is more potent than ever.

The combination of liberal Democrat and deficit hawk Republicans will have the juice necessary to assure that not only will the administration be supported in an accelerated draw down in Afghanistan but that our overall foreign policy will become far less ambitious.  It may even carry the water necessary to assure significant, even enervating, cuts in the defense budget.

The net effect of any drastic, rapid cut out from Afghanistan means in real world terms that the US has lost the political will to oppose violent political Islam.  To put it more cruelly but no less accurately, we will concede victory to the enemy who will, unsurprisingly, seek even greater success against us and the rest of the civilized world.

There is an alternative to a simple pull out disguised as something rather less humiliating.  That alternative would be a combination of open negotiations with Taliban and continued military operations against that group and the ISI proxy, the Haqqani network.  As we learned in Korea and again in Vietnam, the requirement for even limited success is the demonstration of continued political will in a both talk diplomacy and its violent twin, war.  The will and ability to continue fighting--fighting well and hard--even as the endless palaver over very little continues in a seemingly pointless fashion constitutes the demonstration of continued political will which finally convinces the adversary to settle for the best terms we are willing to grant.  There is no doubt that the Karzai government will join in negotiations.  All that is needed is to bring the semi-secret limited contacts into the open while keeping our shooters at it in country.

Unfortunately, the probability of the current administration choosing this twin track route is as remote as the president admitting that he was out to lunch with his Libya "policy."  Libya is, to paraphrase Omar Bradley, the wrong use of air power against the wrong enemy in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Had the US and others been serious about removing Gaddafi, troops would have been landed before the smoke and dust of the first air defense suppression missile strikes had blown clear in the desert wind.  A quick removal of Gaddafi followed by an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces and the introduction of an international peacekeeping force from, perhaps, the Arab League, would have seen the job done in a timely and clean way.  But, the leaders of France, the UK, and the US took counsel of their worst fears based on the inappropriate model of W. Bush in Iraq.

The leaving of Gaddafi is simply the start of the endgame in Libya.  Where the endgame in Afghanistan will be some sort of coalition government which includes Taliban, the players in Libya are not so clear.  There is a strange assemblage of tribal figures, regionalists, secularists, and political Islamists involved in the so-called transitional government.  Their joint agenda beyond the removal of Gaddafi is the to-be-determined department.  The same applies to the role to be played in the future by those Libyans who were genuine adherents of Gaddafi's theory of government.  The foreign supporters of the rebels including the US have to put a major push on the transitional government to put a post-Gaddafi plan on paper at least.

Even if there is a post-regime change plan, this is no assurance that it will be put into effect.  The Western patrons had best realize this.  The Libya which comes into existence after Gaddafi may well not be a showplace of Western norms and values any more than will be the case in Afghanistan.  The post-Gaddafi Libya will be an economic basket case filled with people with scores to settle.  It will not be pretty.  And, it will have the correct climate to encourage the emergence of adherents of violent political Islam.  We will not be fond of that.  But, it may not be preventable.  Get a grip on it.

Everything that is true for Libya applies to Yemen--on steroids.  This will be true to an even greater degree if Saleh escapes from Saudi Arabia and heads back to San'a.  The probability of Yemen becoming a collapsed state is better than fifty-fifty even if Saleh stays in Saudi.  It goes to near certainty if he returns.  And, there is absolutely nothing the US can or will do directly about this.  The most likely "winner" in Yemen will be AQAP which will bode ill not only for Saudi Arabia but the civilized world as well.

The situations in Libya and Yemen make what we do in Afghanistan all the more important.  All eyes, particularly those of the adherents of violent political Islam, will be on what we do and don't do.  Should we go the accelerated withdrawal route, the Mighty Men of the One True Faith will be emboldened greatly.  But, should we demonstrate inexhaustible political will in the dual track of talk while shooting, they will be inhibited in their ambitions.

The choice will be soon in and near the Oval.  Given the political imperatives at work it is likely that the wrong decision will be made.  In that event we can save a little bit of money while cowering in our Homeland Security guaranteed bunker at the mercy at the next martyrdom seeker with a bomb or even no more than a gun show acquired semi-automatic weapon.

It's the world of the future, welcome to it.

The Consequences Of "Leading From Behind."

Michael Oren is a historian whose works by and large have met with the Geek's unqualified approbation.  He is also the current Israeli ambassador in Washington.  Presumably he is good at this job.  One strong indication of his quality of work as well as the sorry state of present day relations between the government of Israel and the Obama administration is an excellent article in Foreign Policy.

The article is a very fine short compass rendition of the American relation with Israel as well as the firm foundations for that relation.  It is nothing less than tragic that the ambassador believed himself compelled to have to write it.  Before the Obama administration there would have been no call for so doing.

The unfortunate reality is that the emerging Obama quasi-doctrine for foreign policy--at least as such obtains in the Mideast, a doctrine labeled "leading from behind" has brought about the necessity of Ambassador Oren's argument.  The same Obama doctrine has resulted in the totality of the mess which constitutes current US policy for the region.  More than that, it has alienated other key allies such as France and the UK as well as perhaps obliging one or both of these countries to deploy ground forces in Libya.

As has been noted many times in this blog, Mr Obama is apparently determined to test whether or not a Great Power can voluntarily resign its status.  Doing so is without historical precedent.  Throughout the sweep of human events, many Great Powers have lost their status through the efforts of other emerging powers or have been dethroned as a consequence of internal collapse, but none have ever simply walked away from it as a voluntary choice.

The approach to the politics of the globe favored by the Nice Young Man From Chicago is one which combines "humility" with a predilection for hectoring of a sermonizing sort.  The "humility" expresses itself in the placing of responsibility for decision making upon international organizations both regional and global.  It is as if the US constantly said to the world, "Well, if you all really, really want us to do something, well, then, we guess, we can go along with it--as long as we are not alone in the job."

What an image!  The US as the most humble and obedient servant of the political will of others, of others in regional or global congress assembled.  Not for us will be the reactionary notion of defining and achieving our national and strategic interests.  No sir, we will meekly seek to submit to the stated will expressed by the consensus or votes of transnational assemblies--that is provided the will is predicated upon ideals we find laudable.

The insect in the Jello of the Obama approach is found in ideals.  The US has ideals, the Obama administration has insisted repeatedly.  To pursue these the US will stand in the background, suitably humble, pressing meekly for decisions on the part of regional and global organs which express our ideals with good effect.  The real key to the notion of "leading from behind" is found in this dynamic--appearing to bow to international will while setting the climate of ideals to which we will bow.

While seeking the shadows in order to be the "hindmost" in international decision making, the administration generally and the president in particular prefers the spotlight.  Standing under the klieg lights, Mr Obama is right at home with his unique brand of hectoring sermon--demands that this leader or that depart the scene without delay, declaring that this or that government's actions are "unacceptable," the general announcement of broad goals with Olympian force.  All of these have been notable during the long days of tumult in the Mideast.

The combination--or more properly, the tension--of ideals based international decision making and absolutist rhetoric have brought about the current strategic and operational dilemma in Libya.  The same duo have resulted in the disconnects  between US actions in Libya, and those not taken in Yemen, Syria, or Bahrain which have resulted in accusations of American hypocrisy.

The fecklessness of NATO in Libya has degraded the credibility of that organization.  At the same time it has added force to the repeated denunciations of the US and NATO being peddled by Vladimir Putin.  It is scarcely necessary to point out that both would have been obviated by the US having acted like the Great Power, taking one or the other of the two top options: stay out or go all the way in.

Had the US done the second--gone all the way in with both air and ground forces in a short duration mission of regime removal only--it could be argued that Syria would have been far more circumspect in its dealing with demonstrators and far more open to the bribe and reform concept favored by the Saudis.  Had the US taken the first of the two options--the stay out option using as its reason the absence of any compelling national or strategic interest, the revolt would have been crushed long ago, probably at a lower overall body count than will prove to be the case when the current fracas is completed.

Either option would have been suitable for the US as a Great Power.  Even the use of a Security Council resolution is completely in keeping with past American Great Power behavior.  However, the present bastard child of "leading from behind" is not befitting of a Great Power.  It is in keeping with the Obama record of refusing to take a public lead, which is consistent over time.  It is keeping with the variable stances taken by Mr Obama in Egypt and Tunisia.  It is in keeping with his long standing practice of trivializing allies while ineffectually genuflecting to assorted adversaries, particularly those of a Muslim majority nature.

Of all the people on the planet least likely to be impressed by a posture of humility and mildness none excel Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims.  Strength acts like strength.  The strong decide--and act on the decision rapidly and without either second thoughts or regrets.  Only weakness is humble.  Only weakness is indecisive.  Only weakness talks tough but fails to lead from the front.

The one time anti-Vietnam War protester and now Secretary of State may sincerely believe that the US should be a less-than-great power.  In  this she may be joined by the president who, after all, was nurtured by a mother who was an early member of the blame-America-First school of thought and educated in academic environments almost totally populated by members of the same school.  Both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton may really, really believe that the day of the nation-state is over and the globalist world is upon us.  Both may rue any American exceptionalism or any American will and ability to act decisively.  But, their view is not one shared by the majority of people--or governments--in the world today.

It is this disconnect between members of the American elite such as Mr Obama and Ms Clinton on the one hand and the majority of folk on the other which make it impossible for the US to resign its Great Power status.  To put it bluntly, governments and people alike expect the US to lead--from the front--to lead as a Great Power.  We and our government are expected to take a clear stand and stick to it.  Then there is a fixed point in favor or opposition of which other states can react.

While the US cannot do everything--even though quite a few people around the world think that we can--it is imperative for the stability and well being of the world that we do some things, things which are in our clear and demonstrable national interest.  We are expected to make decisions and abide by them for more than a single news cycle.  We are expected to be and act like a Great Power and not even the most well meaning of the Lofty Thinking people behind "lead from behind" can change that.

A Little Fear Would Mean A Great Deal Of Respect

The days when the US was both feared by its enemies and respected by its allies and most of the nonaligned are over.  That is a given.  It is also self-evident.  Equally obvious is the absence of American influence in the councils of states both hostile and friendly.

The reason for this does not reside with the economic catastrophe which started in late 2007 and continues to date.  The reason the US is largely irrelevant to the calculations of governments around the world is the failure of the Obama administration, most particularly and importantly the president personally, to develop and consistently implement a foreign policy which is rooted in American norms and values and seeks to foster or protect our national and strategic interests.

Mr Obama is personally responsible for the decline and near fall of the US as a Great Power.  He is personally responsible for the simple and sad fact that no country, no dictator, no advocate of violent political Islam, no aggressive, ambitious regime fears us.  The wrath of the United States is seen to exist no longer.  Without the perception of potential wrath there is no fear.  And, without the capacity to engender fear in those who oppose us, there can be no respect in the estimate of those who are favorable in their inclinations to us.

As recently as 2008 the US was seen as a leader.  Seen as the Greatest of Great Powers.  Seen through the prism of fear by opponents.  And viewed with genuine respect by all others.

Whether the motivations are ideological or purely personal or some mixture (a subject more suitable for a practitioner of a discipline other than history), the fact remains that the US has lost its capacity to influence the world.  While still a Great Power by all the metrics applicable, the president and his "team" have pretended that we are no different, no better, no more powerful than any small and marginal country anywhere on the face of the Earth.  As a result, the states of the world can afford to ignore us and seek leadership elsewhere.

One result of this is implied in a question posed by Nile Gardner in the Daily Telegraph: "Do tyrants fear America anymore?"  The answer, of course, is, "no."  Gardner places the blame correctly on Mr Obama's timid approach to global politics.

If anything, this interpretation is too kind.  The Obama way of dealing with foreign affairs is not merely timid.  It is far worse.  The Obama approach is a combination of utter indifference, contempt for the past role of the US in world affairs, and ideologically predicated naivete.  As a consequence he has been well behind the wave in each and every one of the recent developments in the Mideast.  Another result has been that he has alienated allies ranging from the UK to Israel.  Still another is the simple fact that both Russia and China can turn a blind eye to American policy entreaties without hesitation--or adverse result.

Obama could learn from history--were he so inclined.  He could learn from the example of Ronald Reagan, a man with whom he has compared himself recently.  Early in the Reagan presidency the administration directly tackled the problem of low global fear of the US.  In carefully calculated moves, the US quickly refurbished its image as a strong and borderline ruthless state by (1) invading Grenada under plausible pretenses and (2) attacking Libya by air with even more plausible pretenses.

Neither operation was really necessary to safeguard directly threatened American interests either national or strategic.  Both were utterly essential in rebuilding the respect and fear which had been so completely lost during the disastrous Carter years.  Whether the result was fear, respect, or, in the case of the rather anti-American French government, the "crazy American hypothesis," the net consequence  was that all, both foe and friend, had to recognize that the US was back as an independent and assertive actor on the world stage.

Should the Clueless Guy in the Oval tire of presiding over the Incredible Shrinking United States, and decide the time had come for a little creative and effective fear engendering, a very good target of Uncle Sam's wrath would be the port havens of the Somali pirates.  The recent killing of four Americans gives a good enough plausible reason to forcibly abate the nuisance presented by the pirates of Puntland.

The key to the success of a fear and respect engendering exercise in American power projection is contained in one word--punitive.  The goal would not be the creation and building of a nation-state in Somalia.  Such is impossible as the disaster in Afghanistan and the near debacle in Iraq have made manifest.  The purpose of the exercise would be the liberation of as many hostages as possible and the killing of as many pirates, broadly defined as is convenient in the scope of a short duration military raid.

Lest the current administration be inhibited by residual folk memories of "Blackhawk Down," it needs to recalled that the operation was very poorly planned and worse in its execution.  It needs to be noted that had the operation been postponed a matter of hours, the Marine light armored vehicles would have been available for ground support.  Such a ground component would have militated against any success by the Somali forces even with their numerical advantages.

It is also important, indeed vital, to note that the US has a number of very experienced combat forces in its inventory even with the Afghan war still in progress.  We have learned volumes in both Iraq and Afghanistan which is directly transferable to a short duration punitive expedition.  Such an operation would not be manpower heavy.  Nor can it last more than a matter of a few tens of hours.  Combined with air action, an up close and personal raid would not only free captives but kill gun slingers and intimidate potential successors to those who have died for the "cause."

Provided the operation meets the requirements of being hard, fast, violent, and highly lethal, there is no reason the US cannot nor should not mount it unilaterally.  After all, it was our citizens who died at the hands of the pirates.  Retaliation is a recognized right.  It was the right invoked by the Bush/Cheney administration for the invasion of Afghanistan.

Provided the Americans and retrieved international hostages are evacuated fully in a matter of hours, two days at the most, the diplomatic repercussions will be favorable.  Yes, there will be cries of horror from the ever-so-sensitive members of the Western European and American elites, but even Mr Obama might be able to ignore the expectable.

Somalia will be no more of a mess afterward than it was before.  There might even be some improvement given the deterrent impact of such a punitive raid on the survivors, even those at a distance from the action.  The Somali gun thugs have no experience with the high degree of lethality American forces dispose in even limited usage venues.  For once, "shock and awe" would have a high degree of applicability.

In a way, the mounting of a punitive expedition on the pirate lairs would give us a chance to replay Afghanistan correctly.  This would be good.  It would draw a line between that which can be done--punish bad guys--and that which is impossible--construct a modern Western style nation-state from a traditional, tribal Muslim base.  It would also be good in that such an operation would put all bad actors on alert as to what might come their way should they get too over the edge.

Most importantly and most beneficially, a quick and dirty raid would show the world, from our allies in Western Europe to our opponents in the Kremlin, Tehran, Beijing, Caracas, and elsewhere that the US was not a potted plant decorating the global arena.  And that, bucko, is something the world needs badly right now.

Then There Is China

When neo-liberal Bill Clinton "opened" the door to China, the Geek went into one of his here-there-be-tygers moods.  Contrary to the peace, love, and flower power words of the Arkansas Terror, the Geek viewed the normalization of trade and financial relations with the "Central Empire" (to use the most accurate translation of the ancient Chinese term for their country) as a severe self-inflicted injury to the US and its national interests.

The Geek made a set of fearless predictions in those bygone days to assorted military and foreign policy audiences.  Among those were a massive hemorrhage of dollars and jobs to the benefit of the Trolls of Beijing.  He also warned that the self-same Trolls would use their bushels of bucks to do the following: massively ramp up their military capacities, purchase allies wherever possible, seek exploitable fossil fuels particularly oil and national gas, seek to immunize themselves against crop failures, and, lastly but most importantly, undertake all measures possible to become both the regional  hegemon of Asia and a Great Power able to limit the ability of the US to operate on the world stage.

The Geek's credible imitation of Cassandra was pooh-poohed by many who were in the audiences but the Geek serenely assured all, "Just wait fifteen years or so."  Well within the time limit, all the dreary forecasts have proven correct as well as other, equally dismal, events not foreseen by the Geek.  The Geek missed, for example, the Chinese scarfing up of Uncle Sam's IOU's  to say nothing of the extent of the debt which was to come.  He also failed to see that the Trolls would pursue crop failure immunization by purchasing farmlands in Africa by the multiples of square miles.  He also overlooked Chinese ventures in strategic metals.  But, overall he did get the picture correct.

In return for the loss of jobs--even entire industries and cargo ships filled with bucks--the American public got mounds of non-essential but inexpensive consumer expendables courtesy of the big boxes with Walmart at the forefront.  More than the biblical character, We the People sold out our heritage for a mess of potage--shoddy pottage at that.

The Han Chinese, courtesy of the differing ideological imperatives of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush abetted by the sheer greed of the American consumer and the bottomline fixation of American businesses, have become the largest, most coherent, and self-confident tribe on the planet's surface.  The combination of economic success, personal enrichment, an ever more powerful military, a very self-assured and authoritarian leadership have given the Han tribe both the political will and material capacity to treat the rest of the world, the barbarians, as a pseudo-colonial environment upon which to work their will.

The Central Empire has returned--on steroids.

The Chief Troll, President Hu Jintao, is soon to arrive for a state visit with President Obama.  While President Hu is arguably the weakest chief of state since Mao declared the revolution to have succeeded over sixty years ago, his coming to Washington is an imperial procession, the Emperor meets the Chief Barbarian.  It will be interesting to see the optics of the visit, to see if the given-to-fawning American president bows and kowtows in appropriately servile fashion.

It is commonplace to assert that the current relations of the US with China are "troubled" or passing through a period of "difficulties."  This sort of terminology not only belabors the obvious but masks the fundamental reality.

The ground truth is that the US and China are rivals in a zero sum game.  Insofar as the Trolls gain an advantage diplomatically, economically, or militarily the US loses.  Insofar as the US can maintain the status quo, the Trolls lose.  And, should the US miraculously reverse the negative trend of the past decade and more, the Trolls lose big time.

These considerations as well as the nature of the specific game of nations now being played by the US and China imply that the upcoming Hu-Obama confab has powerful subtexts at work below the facade of ruffles, flourishes, and banquets.  The stakes are very high.  One can be sure President Hu knows this.  One cannot be so sure that Mr Obama does.

The reason for uncertainty regarding President Obama stems from the fact that while the Trolls practice a realpolitik of remorseless and ruthless sort, the American does not.  Neither Mr Obama nor some senior members of his administration--think Secretary of State Clinton--are given to realpolitik other than on an episodic basis.  This puts the Americans at a profound disadvantage when facing men who pursue the national and strategic interests of China all the time.

The American president has shown that he has no clue regarding the essential nature of national interest.  He appears unaware that national and strategic interests are both subjective and defined only by the government and associate elite in any given nation-state.  He also shows no sensitivity to the role played by history, both objective and subjective, in the formation and pursuit of national interest based goals. This means that Mr Obama and other key players on his "foreign policy team" are both blind and deaf in comparison with their Chinese interlocutors.

Given the profoundly different historical predicates of contemporary national interests as well as the zero sum nature of the game being played, it is arguable that the US and China have very few, if any, coinciding national interests.  The gulf between the world views and perceived interests of both countries may be greater than that which existed between the US and the Soviet Union in the Fifties and Sixties.

A good illustration of the differences between the Cold War on the one hand and today's zero sum game with China is seen in the very conservatism of the Soviet leadership.  The Soviets never sought to extend their influence as broadly and blatantly as have the Trolls in places far removed from the homeland.  China has shown a capacity for "adventurism" in Africa, for example, far surpassing even the most ambitious aspirations of the Soviets during the post-Vietnam decade.

China's lack of cooperation on Iran or North Korea also has been emblematic of the gulf in national interests between the US and Beijing.  Quite simply, the Trolls see little if anything threatening about the Iranian nuclear quest.  Their intelligence and diplomatic establishments have discounted (correctly) any negatives emerging from the Iranian quarter.  They have no interests directly involved in the Gulf states or the Mideast generally.  The Chinese interest in Iran is limited to oil and money.  As a consequence, leaning in the direction of Tehran suits the Trolls perfectly.  The collateral benefit of the Iranian contretemps fostering division and diversion in the West is just a bit of frosting on the cake.

Maintaining the status quo in North Korea is what Beijing focuses on.  The matters of nuclear weapons research and development or companion work on missiles is of no interest to the Chinese as the Trolls have the means and will to assure no threats come their way.  The Trolls are rightly worried about a disastrous miscalculation in Pyongyang and will take the minimum necessary steps to reduce that potential.  They will and are doing the same in the event of governmental collapse in the Hermit Kingdom.

The game moves from non-cooperation to direct confrontation in Southeast Asia.  The Trolls are of the view that they are the regional hegemon by right.  In short, the Trolls have picked up the mantel once worn by the Imperial Japanese.  As a consequence, the countries of Southeast Asia have cozied up to the US.  This gravitational movement has set the stage for direct confrontation between the US and China.

In Southeast Asia and the western Pacific littoral, the confrontation must be direct.  Unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Trolls have no credible local proxies to wage the war on their behalf.  The various and sundry proxy wars of the Seventies and Eighties gave the US and the Soviet Union an automatic firebreak and thus precluded escalation which, once started, must eventually run the risk of crossing the nuclear threshold.  With the possible exception of Burma--a proxy of a proxy--China has no straw men to set up to do their dirty work in the region.

The Chinese awareness of the direct nature of the potential confrontation has been made manifest in their new weaponry and doctrine.  The ballistic missile powered "spike from space" is directed against the floating sovereignty of an American aircraft carrier.  The recently test flown J-20 is anti-US in its missions.  Cyberwar is the hottest game in China--with the US as the main target.

Against this the US is operating in a--to put it mildly--budget constrained environment.  The US will be cutting its defense establishment as the Chinese continue to develop theirs.  While the Americans enjoy some technological advantages as with the next generation of remotely operated and autonomous unmanned platforms, we should not overvalue the advantages this confers.  Nor is the US well advised to do in the future what it has done so often in the past, undervalue the capacities of an Asian adversary.

The Trolls do, fortunately, face some very real challenges at home.  Inflation is growing and this may succeed where American importuning has failed, cause the Trolls to appreciate the value of their currency.  China is also facing twin crises of farmland degradation and decline in the agricultural water supply.  This will put a very real squeeze on the Trolls just as the majority of their citizens have come to appreciate a Western style diet.  With the explosive growth in personal motor vehicle ownership, China will need ever greater amounts of oil at a low price lest the population suffer a crisis of rising expectations.

In addition, the Han tribe faces challenges from the ten percent of the population which is non-Han.  The inevitable requirement will be for more and more repression.  Ramping up repression will cause collateral and potentially destabilizing effects on members of the Han tribe.  Balancing the needs for repression of the minority while assuring a minimal but growing amount of freedom for the educated youth of the Han tribe will prove to be a non-trivial problem for the Trolls of Beijing.

Recent polls have shown a disturbing acceptance of American decline and Chinese ascendancy on the part of a large segment of We the People.  There is no need for this sort of bland indifference, for this meek agreement to an evermore constricted global role for the US.  The worst need not come to pass if the present administration as well as what and whoever comes to the Oval in 2013 plays a realistic game of pursuing American national interest.

It is to be hoped that Obama 2.0 contains a backbone as well as an eye for American supremacy.  The test comes off camera during the state visit.  It comes not with respect to any American hectoring over Chinese respect for human rights but rather in the blunt or soft speaking on matters military and diplomatic.  The test comes with President Obama either saying or avoiding saying, "Here I stand.  I can do no other."

We Are Safer Today--Or Not

Fareed Zakaria has charged to the fore once again with his contention that we Americans are far safer from the threat of terror operations conducted by proponents of violent political Islam today than the doom-mongers of the Right would have us believe. He argues that the Bush/Cheney administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and displace Taliban in favor of a democratic (and presumably pluralistic, liberal, free enterprise) system--and the "amping" of the effort by Mr Obama necessarily resulted in the defanging of al-Qaeda and the insurance of our safety.

Ironically, one of the architects of the Great Effort In Afghanistan, Robert Blackwell, has come to an antipodal conclusion. Reportedly, he has told the London based International Institute of Strategic Studies that the US led effort has come such a cropper that the only viable option now is to partition Afghanistan. Taliban should be left alone in the Pushtun dominated areas while the US and its partners limit their efforts to securing some sort of rump state in the rest of the geographic expression, those areas where Pushto is not the primary language.

The reason for this volte-face on the part of Mr Blackwell is one commented upon quite frequently by the Geek. He now rues the mission leap decreed by his bosses which shifted the goal from that of a limited punitive expedition directed at destroying al-Qaeda and the upper layers of Taliban to one of displacing Taliban with the mythical democratic etc. new regime. As a consequence of this change in mission, the Islamist insurgents were given time, a place, and motivation to recreate themselves and come back bigger and badder than ever.

Leaving aside such bagatelles as Mr Blackwell's role in the shift or the under-resourcing of the Afghan effort in favor of the main event over in Iraq, there are more important considerations which can be adduced to support the Blackwell Thesis that the US is losing (or already has lost) the war in Afghanistan. These more important considerations also serve to undercut fatally the unjustifiably optimistic view taken by Mr Zakaria.

Several often overlooked or quite underestimated factors combine to point in the direction of an American failure in our ongoing conflict with the advocates of political Islam both armed and unarmed. Oh, this gloomy prognostication should not be taken to mean that in the future We the People will be banging our heads on the floors of mosques five times a day or putting women in garbage sacks. But, it does mean the US will be limited, perhaps quite severely, in its ability to operate diplomatically in a wide area of the world.

And, it means that We the People will have to live with the limitations of fear and the mechanisms of security put in place to assuage our anxiety for many, many years to come, essentially in perpetuity. It means the "war on terror" will prove to be not the "long war" but the "forever war."

One of the key factors at work to our collective disadvantage was alluded to by Victor Davis Hanson albeit in an unnecessarily indirect way. The thrust of Dr Hanson's point as the Geek understands it is that the motivation, the evil, if you will, has been denatured from the attacks of 9/11, making the events as disconnected from human authorship and motives as would be the random strike of a meteor. The net effect of this deracination is to strip the progenitors of the attacks as well as their consequences from the human context.

That result is as wrong as grilled watermelon.

The subtext of the neutering of the attacks of 9/11 as well as the resultant US actions constitutes a set of phenomena permeating contemporary American values. Bluntly put, this set revolves around the major message of the American Left over the past forty years--the US is inherently evil, intrinsically mean spirited, reflexively imperialistic, arrogant, self-serving, self-seeking, and, all in all, a thoroughly unpleasant member of the global neighborhood. Beyond that, Americans, We the People, are afflicted with every "ism" listed in the catalogue of misery. We are a completely unpleasant bunch of chauvinists, sexists, xenophobes, religious bigots, and fanatical "clingers."

As a result, the American people are encouraged to back away from the challenges to us, our values, and way of life by our own self-appointed political, media, and academic elites. We are and have been told repeatedly that our values and way of life are not exceptional, that they are no better (but might be worse) than the values of other societies and cultures. There is no message from those who purport to mold and lead public opinion that we are unique, that we possess qualities and values which have provided institutions worthy of both envy and emulation.

As has been true throughout the West, the US has experienced not simply a crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith, but a meltdown of belief in ourselves and our worth which has extended for the best part of three generations. Absent the buoyant self-assurance of earlier generations, we have been unwilling or unable to both articulate what we stand for, why we stand for it, why it worth believing and standing for, and not simply defend against all comers but advance against all odds.

From the closing years of the Vietnam War forward the loss of faith in ourselves and the unique past which served to make us an equally unique people and nation in the present has become evermore pervasive and structured into the rituals of passage from the child to the adult. The early and complete capture of academia by the aging New Lefters nearly forty years ago has resulted in a transformation of the formal mechanisms of inculturalization (and most of the informal ones as well) from one which both reinforced and celebrated American exceptionalism to one which denied and deprecated it.

Our faiths both religious and civic have evaporated over the years. The education reinforced evaporative process has left us rather hollow, and certainly confused about the value of our values, the worth of our institutions, the deservingness of our nation, even the status of our country in the world. It is hard as hell to fight a war when you have little if any idea as to why you are fighting and what difference it might make if you win or lose.

This opens the door to the folks on the other side of the hill. The Muslims. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, the proponents of political Islam, particularly those who advocate the necessity or desirability of armed, violent political Islam.

Unlike the faiths, both religious and civic in the West, in the US, the faith of the Muslim is alive, vivid, vigorous, full-bloomed. In a very real and critical sense, Islam has recaptured the militancy of its youth during the past thirty to fifty years. While the faiths of the West have aged, aged quite ungracefully, the faith of Islam has regained its full vigor of centuries ago.

Islam, it must be understood, is not simply a religious confession. It is that. It is a faith. But it is much more. Islam is a way of life and of living. It is a complete, total system encompassing all aspects of the human condition. It is law. It is government. It is a system of economic philosophy. It is a community. It is a way of war. There is no part of life too small to elude its all inclusive embrace.

The basics of Islam, the Five Pillars, are both easy to understand and not overly onerous to execute. There is no complex liturgy, no complicated doctrine to parse and accept even if not understood. In effect, Islam provides emotional engagement, a strong sense of community, an equally strong and appealing sense of purpose, even destiny. It provides a commonsensical, real world based system for governing relations, solving disputes, maintaining harmony.

So far, so good. And, it gets better. Islam is multifaceted. Not only is there no central clerical establishment, there are actually two foundation forms of Islam.

No, not Shia and Sunni. Rather there is an "official" Islam, the Islam of the clerics, the scholars of jurisprudence, the Ulema. There is also an "unofficial" Islam, the Islam of people, particularly people organized in the semi-secret brotherhoods, the tarika.

For centuries the tarika have been the primary instrument of missionary activity, humanitarian efforts, community organization, and a multitude of other matters. These brotherhoods give Islam a flexibility, a vitality, a capacity to expand unequalled in other religions and unrivalled by government entities.

Today, the brotherhoods are alive and well as the shock troops of Islam both political and otherwise. The prototype Muslim Brotherhood has given rise to a near tsunami of derivatives, offshoots, descendants which cover the globe and do all manner of activities both laudable and (to us) potentially threatening. The capacities of the brotherhoods have been consistently underestimated by decision makers here and elsewhere to our profound disadvantage.

There is another area which has been underappreciated in the US. It is the one factor which ties together disparate elements in the recent history of Muslim majority countries so as to explain why there has been the sudden expansion of not only militant Islam but the advocates of political Islam, again, particularly those who espouse violent political Islam.

That factor is the educational systems of majority Muslim countries. The essential contextual matter is the expansion of the number of genuinely independent majority Muslim states at the end of World War II--four--to the nearly sixty of today. With independence came the new educational systems which universally emphasized a heady combination of nationalism and Islam.

Particularly since the late Fifties, the expansion of educational systems indoctrinating students in the glories of Islam and the evils of the West has been critical. By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the somewhat later perceived triumph of armed Muslim believers over the Red Army, the educational systems of many, even most, Muslim majority states were producing large numbers of graduates who may have been deficient in their proficiency in secular subjects but were most knowledgeable in Islamic belief, values, and history as well as in the purported lacks, weaknesses, and "sins" of the West.

Against the backdrop of this form of indoctrination oriented education, the youth of Muslim countries soaked up the perceived victories of their co-religionists in Iran (against the Great Satan, the US) and Afghanistan (against the atheistic Soviet Union) with the result they were good to go in jihad. All that was needed was a "brotherhood" ready, willing, and able to provide the leadership, training, and strategic goal.

This was the role of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and the numerous others in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, across North Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, and even in Europe. The troops were there, produced by the madrassas and state operated systems alike. The "brotherhoods" were there. The motive was there--cleansing the Arab Peninsula of the "infidel" Americans and the Arab Mideast of the "Zionist entity."

The decentralized nature of "official" Islam is both complemented and potentiated by the assorted brotherhoods. Simultaneously, the educational systems of Muslim majority states continue to churn out fully indoctrinated graduates who are eager to defend and advance the One True Faith, to die (and kill) for the faith.

In short, Muslim strengths mirror our weaknesses.

They are confident. We are not.

They are educated to believe in the high value of their faith, their beliefs. We are educated to doubt, to distrust, to eschew the beliefs and values upon which our society, our polity, our culture are predicated.

They have a broad set of flexible, informal, self-organizing brotherhoods. We rely upon remote, rigid, tinted with arrogance official bureaucracies.

They see the future as theirs, ordained by Allah. We see our best days as being well in our past.

When these more basic considerations are given their proper priority, the conclusions are simple and not particularly enjoyable. It really doesn't matter if we "triumph" in Afghanistan. Nor will merely surrendering a part of that place to the violent political Islamists of Taliban buy us any peace.

Nor does it really matter if every last member of al-Qaeda is killed. We will be no "safer."

Not unless and until we regain the confidence, the faith which we have so heedlessly and unnecessarily tossed away these past two generations, can we hope to wage effective war with the violent political Islamists. And, not unless and until we can see the decay of the current high level of Muslim certainty that the future belongs to the Slaves of Allah can we have any hope of being safe at home and potent abroad.

Looks like some very grim decades ahead.

ADMIN NOTE: The Geek invites, welcomes and will post all on topic comments but due to having been attacked by spam comments he has had to take precautions for which he apologizes.

To Lose Faith Is To Lose Everything

Senator John McCain implored President Obama to use his engaging personal narrative as a mechanism in a coherent international effort to bring about peaceful regime change in Iran. There is no chance that the Nice Young Man From Chicago will do so. More important is the reason why he will remain on the sidelines.

Mr Obama, in common with the vast majority of the American hoi oligoi, the self-nominated elite of our politics, our mainstream media, our academe, our molders of public opinion, has lost faith in the US as a collective endeavor as a result of rejecting faith in the American people. Mr Obama represents a fatal current in our collective existence, one which may well lead the US to the same graveyard as the Soviet Union.

Think back to the sudden and (to all too many of those for whom conventional, received wisdom is the only wisdom) shocking collapse of the Soviet Union and its outer empire, the Warsaw Pact nations. Many reasons have been put forth as to the fall of the monolith. Rarely mentioned is the main cause of the implosion. Loss of faith.

As far back as the early Eighties, before the gerontocracy had shuffled off Lenin's Tomb for one of their own, the aging leadership had lost faith in the power of Marxism-Leninism to achieve even an imitation of success. At the same time the rising Soviets were recognizing the same ground truth. The apparent rationality, the presumed scientific objectivity of Marxism, was irrelevant in the lives of real, often less than purely rational, humans.

Loss of faith, loss of confidence in the merits of one's beliefs, one's sense of values, one's goals and aspiration translates at the governmental level to the institutional equivalent of depression in the individual. That equivalent is loss of political will. It's the replacement of the will to do, the will to at least attempt, with a what-the-hell?, it-isn't-worth-the-effort attitude.

Gorbachev and others realized that the continued failure of the Marxist-Leninist system and its underlying philosophy of centrally applied rationality could no longer be blamed on the excesses of Stalin or the failure of Khrushchev's "Virgin Land Scheme." The Soviet Union was doomed to extinction because there was no cause for faith, no basis for the self-certitude without which an empire or a state cannot long endure.

The Soviet monolith fell to the astonishment of the ever-so-rational analysts of the Agency and academia from a seemingly irrational cause--loss of faith and national self-confidence. The leadership saw no reason to go on. No justification for continuing. No impetus to do other than admit failure.

The loss of faith leading to the loss of a seemingly impervious, efficiently repressive system was not a first in human history. Other states, other empires, have fallen for the same reason. From the earliest times onward to the present, the loss of political will consequent upon a loss of faith has been, if not the only cause, a primary contributor to the collapse of empire or state.

The same dynamic, the trajectory of loss of faith, abandonment of certitude, resignation to fate and failure has been alive and growing in the US since the mid period of the Vietnam War. At the giddy-up it was a pathology unique to the New Left. As the years passed, the meme of "America-the-Evil spread wider.

Part of the reason for the spread was the proliferation of "rights" movements. Rather than celebrating the capacity of We the People and our nation to recognize and make good faith efforts to remove impediments and provide remedies to those forced to the margins, the "rights" industry instead hyped the politics of victimization. It became ever more critical for those who were members of the "rights" brigade to find, or invent, new categories of victims--and more categories of oppressors and victimizers.

Another critical vector for spreading the loss of faith in ourselves and our institutions comes from the rise of that insidiously seductive intellectual fad of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism and its very close cousin, post-modernism, which asserts (without substantial factual merit) that everyone's "narrative" is equally true, and, as a corollary, that no genuine history or language exists, rather that both are the construct of the politically potent of any given time and place.

Both of these philosophical strains have a very real appeal to Americans, particularly those who are afflicted by specious guilt over their access to education, to advantages both political and economic, and seek to offload this guilt by standing as self-appointed tribunes for those who are not similarly situated. Guilt is assuaged by demanding the newly discovered (or invented) victims be celebrated and the newly discovered (or invented) oppressors be cut down, punished, sent to an eternal Coventry.

The professorate is a natural habitat for the perpetually guilty, for all of those who avoided the perils of life by seeking refuge in the ivy covered havens of academe. It was there that the faith sapping ideas of "Blame America First," "Invent the Victim," and "Finger the Oppressor" emerged and spread.

In the detached academic petri dishes of American higher education, the pathogens attacking faith in the American people, the American ideals, the American experiment spread from generation to generation. Ultimately, these germs could be found not only in the tertiary level but in the secondary and even primary levels of our school systems.

It comes as no surprise that the rising generations of the American "elites" including the current president, many in the mainstream media, the judiciary, the political class, are all fully converted to the view that the US and the American hoi polloi are damaged goods. It is not at all shocking that these folk have no faith in either the US or the American people. It is only expectable, then, that these exemplars of cultural relativism, post-modernism, "America-the-Evil, wish and work to see the US humbled, diminished, rendered impotent.

In the real world of clashing interests, the net effect is for the US to accept defeat, even degradation, as such fits with their faithless worldview. This loss of faith, abandonment of confidence in the country, We the People, American ideals and values leaves the globe open to those with confidence, with faith in themselves and their goals.

The tragedy is simply that the people with faith, with confidence, with ambition, free of faux guilt, false modesty are those who would put women in garbage bags, cut off heads for thought crime, and fly airliners into buildings. This is a tragedy not only for the US and other civilized countries but for those (as in Iran) living under the brutal boots of primitive ideologues.

We can comfort ourselves with the realization that not only have we elected a man without faith in America, but we allowed the pathogens which will defeat us to breed unchecked in our midst for the past forty years.

Comfort? How so, Geek?

It is a comfort because that which we allowed to be created by us can be ended, destroyed by us. That is, if there are enough of us who still have faith in ourselves and our country.

The US: Last, Best Hope Of Mankind?

For a very long time, generations at least, Americans held as an article of shared faith that their nation and state represented "the last, best hope of mankind." It was the most commonly held sense of "American exceptionalism." Even when confronted with the myriad warts on the face of Uncle Sam, Americans maintained that their experiment as the only country created on a set of shared ideas and aspirations remained the beacon to the rest of the world.

Now that long-standing, widely held self-understanding is crumbling. The tattering of the tapestry of shared myth is shown in a recent Rasmussen survey. The numbers show that barely half of We the People currently hold this positive view of our collective endeavor. When examined closely, vast gulfs on the basis of age and political inclination exist within our social and political body.

Younger Americans overwhelmingly reject the contention that our country represents a hope for the human race. Only thirty-seven percent see matters this way. Fifty-one percent of those of us under thirty reject the proposition categorically. In the wheezing geezer category the percentages run in the opposite direction with sixty-two out of a hundred holding the positive view.

Not surprisingly the conservatives overwhelmingly agree with the positive sentiment while those identifying themselves as liberals are not so certain--forty-three percent hold thumbs down and twenty-nine percent give the US the thumbs up. Another interesting dichotomy comes in comparing the "political class" (as defined by Rasmussen's methodology which seems superficially at least to be sound) and the "mainstream" public. While fifty-eight percent of the "mainstream" are positive, only thirty-one percent of the "political class" agree.

An examination of the Rasmussen method for defining the "political class"--based on three questions plumbing the attitude of the respondent regarding the role of government versus that of the individual--indicates the existence of a large and completely predictable overlap between self-identified liberals and members of the "political class."

Both groups, for example, see the government as being more important than the individual in determining the quality of an individual's life.

Both also agree on the proposition that government has an affirmative obligation to interfere in economic and social matters in order to assure equal and just outcomes.

In addition both groups see the government as playing the key role in protecting people from the consequences of poor personal decision making.

In a companion poll Rasmussen found out that both the liberals and the "political class" hold the UN in higher esteem than they do the US in addressing global issues including those of war and peace than do conservatives and the "mainstream." Seventy-nine percent of the "mainstream" respondents saw the US as a more "positive" force in the world than the UN. Among the "political class" the percentage was much smaller--just forty-five percent. The numbers are similar when comparing conservatives and liberals.

(It deserves mention that ninety-seven percent of the "political class" see the UN in the most favorable light. In sharp contrast sixty-three percent of the "mainstream" view the UN unfavorably.)

Unfortunately the survey on attitudes concerning the UN did not provide an age serrated breakdown. If it had, the Geek is willing to bet hair, the dichotomy between youth and senescence would have duplicated that exhibited in the "last, best hope of mankind" report.

The negative view held by the under-thirty demographic segment is no shock to anyone who has either participated in or closely observed the degeneration in the teaching of American history at all levels from the primary grades to the rarefied air of grad school. The constant theme of deprecation which pervades the entirety of American education at least as regards the history of We the People and the state we have created could have no other result.

The never-ending reiteration of a monomaniacal focus of the American people and the US as a corporate entity as victimizer, exploiter, and imperialistic monger of war is not only historically invalid, a travesty, a sin of both commission and omission. It is also a disservice to the future the magnitude of which is impossible to overestimate.

The primary obligation of the historian--or the teacher of history--is to convey the past as it actually was unpolluted by political or personal agenda or propensity. This means it is equally wrong to hold the US as being "exceptional" in its purity of motive and effort as to interpret the past only in the blackest hues.

Back in the deepest depths of the Cold War both teachers and writers of history were expected to portray the American past as being a smooth, unbroken record of ever greater freedom, equality, and angelic accomplishment. Under the gimlet eyes of the anticommunist crusaders it was as much as a person's job was worth to mention any of the multitude of ills and evils which constituted milestones on our collective drunkards walk to the present. Tenure was the only--and often frail--protector of the academic or public school teacher who adumbrated any negative in our collective experience.

The justification offered was the tired refrain, "It would harm our security and open us to subversion if the facts were known or the truth told."

Since the triumph of the Sixties vintage blame-America-First folks in higher education thirty plus years ago, the tide shifted radically. Since the late Seventies it has been increasingly politically unfashionable not to say dangerous to one's career to see the past (and often, the present as well) in terms which are at all laudable. The textbooks and lectures alike have shifted so as to emphasize every deficiency--real or imagined--which can possibly be impugned to Americans generally and their government, businesses, churches, and leaders more particularly.

The Americans and the institutions of their making have been (mis)characterized as having been unrelievedly racist, sexist, exploitative, imperialistic and generally repressive, oppressive, suppressive, and depressive. We and our institutions have been portrayed as existing only to benefit rich white guys at the expense of all the rest of us. We have been accused and convicted of dominating the world for the most base and selfish of reasons. Of looking for countries to invade. Of despoiling not only our territory but as much of the world's surface as our clutching greedy hands could grasp.

With such an unchanging picture of base evil, of astounding horror as the leitmotif of history it is small wonder that recent graduates (or "through-put products") of the American educational system would hold such a negative view of their country. More surprising is that more than a third of the under-thirties accept as true the contention that the US is the "last, best hope of mankind."

As a scholar and teacher of history the Geek has always believed it was both an ethical obligation and a requirement of intellectual integrity to see the past as it actually was rather than as he personally would have preferred it to have been. It is only by understanding the causal chains as well as the evolving context that one can appreciate the nature and direction of historical trajectories. More, it is only by understanding the trajectories which have brought the present into being that one can accurately appreciate what is happening today--and why it is happening.

There is a point to this exercise. Only by understanding the trajectories and the present which they have created can one hope to both predict the future--and, most importantly, exercise some influence, no matter how small, on the future. An accurate understanding of the past not only makes the present more readily and comprehensively understood; it empowers the individual in undertaking actions intended to influence the future course of events.

The blame-America-first bunch and their fellow travelers of the cultural relativism crowd hope to influence the future in line with their individual agendas by means of indoctrination. These scholars and teachers seek to propagandize not educate, to bend pliant minds to a preformed idea, not encourage independent, critical thinking. They hope to manufacture a future by having manufactured a uniquely distorted historical past.

In the short term they have succeeded in their ambitions as indicated by the Rasmussen reports alluded to. Whether they will succeed equally well in the longer term is less certain.

It is to be hoped that they fail. The historical record shows clearly that while the American experiment has had any number of very negative impacts, overall there is more truth than falsehood in the proposition that the US is "the last, best hope of mankind."