Victor David Hanson argues that Americans are growing world-weary. It is certainly true that we see ourselves as doing so much good, as being so essential for the peace of the world, of making so many sacrifices so that others may enjoy the fruits of freedom, and yet we're hated and despised by so many of the world's people who couldn't care less about the help and welfare we bring.
We are, moreover, growing increasingly apprehensive that the world is determined to destroy itself. It doesn't want what we offer, either materially or spiritually. Nor does it want peace. The world has gone mad and the feeling is that there isn't anything much we can do about it. Here are a few highlights from Hanson's take on the situation:
An American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople - huddled in their churches and shuttered schools - almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets.
After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker. It was precisely that paradox between impotent high-sounding rhetoric and blunt-speaking, roughshod courage that lay at the heart of the classic Western from Shane and High Noon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven.
The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves - swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices - to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims - as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.
China, flush with billions in trade surplus, first offers a few million to its immediate Asian neighbors before increasing its contributions in the wake of massive gifts from Japan and the United States. Peking's gesture was what the usually harsh New York Times magnanimously called "slightly belated." In this weird sort of global high-stakes charity poker, no one asks why tiny Taiwan out-gives one billion mainlanders or why Japan proves about the most generous of all - worried the answer might suggest that postwar democratic republics, resurrected and nourished by the United States and now deeply entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of democracy, capitalism, and humanitarianism, are more civil societies than the Islamic theocracies, socialist republics, and authoritarian autocracies of the once-romanticized third world.
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.
In an earlier post Viewpoint recalled the theme of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which Rand imagines a world in which those who produce wealth, ideas, and benefits for all the rest of us finally weary of all the obstacles put in their way by those jealous of their greatness and resentful of their success. At length these Nietzschean supermen decide they've had enough and they all retire from the affairs of the world, leaving the paltry parasitic classes to fend for themselves. Perhaps, Hanson is correct and Americans are beginning to see themselves as the characters in Rand's novel. If so, if we do turn inward and embrace an isolationist foreign policy, the consequences for the world would be catastrophic.
In a post last June we wrote the following:
Consider, for example, what would happen in Asia if the U.S. ceased to be able [or willing] to project power into this region. North and South Korea would quickly be at each other's throats, as would the Peoples' Republic of China and Taiwan. Japan and other states in the region would be unable to remain neutral and would get sucked into a hellish vortex of war that would consume the entire Pacific rim.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel's Arab neighbors would seize an opportunity they had been denied by American might for fifty years and invade Israel, spawning a conflict that would almost certainly result in the detonation of nuclear weapons.
A similar scenario would doubtless play out on the Indian subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and would also almost certainly culminate in a nuclear exchange. Africa, too, would likely break out in renewed tribal and racial violence.
Europe would be thrown into turmoil by its Arab populations and by renewed fighting in the Balkans. These stresses would exacerbate old hatreds and open old wounds between the countries of Europe which have warred repeatedly against each other for two thousand years, and would doubtless bring at least some of them into conflict with each other again.
It's hard to imagine the carnage that would result from all of this. The world teeters on a tightrope over a hellish chasm, and it is only the balance pole of American force that has kept us from plunging into that abyss.
The only thing that's changed in the last six months, Hanson tells us, is that some Americans feel a little more like maybe we should just let nature take its course.