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| The Disenchanted American: Are we growing world-weary? by VDH |
| 2005-01-11 |
| There is a new strange mood of acceptance among Americans about the world beyond our shores. Of course, we are not becoming naïve isolationists of 1930s vintage, who believe that we are safe by ourselves inside fortress America — not after September 11. Nor do citizens deny that America has military and moral obligations to stay engaged abroad — at least for a while yet. Certainly the United States is not mired in a Vietnam-era depression and stagflation and thus ready to wallow in Carteresque malaise. Indeed, if anything Americans remain muscular and are more defiant than ever. Instead, there is a new sort of resignation rising in the country, as the United States sheds its naiveté that grew up in the aftermath of the Cold War. Clintonism may have assumed that terrorism was but a police matter, that the military could be slashed and used for domestic social reform by fiat, that our de facto neutrals were truly our friends, and that the end of the old smash-mouth history was at hand. The chaotic events following the demise of the Soviet Union, the mass murder on September 11, and the new strain of deductive anti-Americanism abroad cured most of all that. Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that — and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #5 Thanks, trailing wife! I shoulda done that myself! ;) |
| Posted by: Desert Blondie 2005-01-11 8:36:36 PM |
| #4 Ask, and ye shall receive, DB: All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory — and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-01-11 2:39:47 PM |
| #3 Americans...grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore. VDH is just the best. Every time I read what he has written it gives me some new angle to think about. Still, I don't think it's that Americans don't care that the rest of the world is spiteful and ungrateful--rather, Americans have had it with being used like the host for a league of life-destroying parasites and, in increasing numbers, are openly contemptuous of helping those who work to harm us. |
| Posted by: Dr. Jules 2005-01-11 2:29:03 PM |
| #2 Too bad you don't include the last paragraph. It's what I've been telling my foreign friends for the past year. |
| Posted by: Desert Blondie 2005-01-11 1:48:35 PM |
| #1 The democrats have become the de facto party of isolationism. A great irony, in that they consider themselves internationalist; it is because they have no grasp of foreign, economic or military policy in international affairs. A good example of this are those chosen as cabinet officers in these areas. The "empty suit", William Christopher; Madeline Albright, whose foreign policy was to send small contingents of unsupported soldiers to every country on the planet; draft-dodging Harold Brown as SecDef, etc. These are not wise choices--even leftist academicians could be expected to perform better. Instead, they show an indifference, perhaps the idea that "they do it better", or "they have their own way, and we shouldn't interfere". It is as if the democrats try to obey the Star Fleet Prime Directive with other nations, but not so as to not influence the development of their culture, but on the assumption that their culture is somehow better than ours. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-01-11 12:08:12 PM |