The value of a strong military arises out of the worth of it protects. The idea of America, the embrace of American exceptionalism, and the peaceful and just path of consensual government and liberal democracy, makes a strong military necessary. The political Right unites in this concern and has common ground with a portion of the political Left.
First, most of the political Left creates imaginary enemies to liberal democracy. Since America is as bad as Russia or China, since Islamic countries have justifiable reasons for their anger at their oppression at the hands of liberal democracies, there are no genuine enemies external to America or liberal democracies. Therefore, they point to imaginary internal enemies, which are often the military, the police, the political Right, and especially the devout religious person. The latter focuses upon the evangelical or the Roman Catholic.
Although it did not receive enough of an audience to continue, I liked the television series Jericho. The story starts with a nuclear bomb exploding in a city near the town of Jericho. The suspected antagonists were North Korea and Iran. China airlifts food supplies, with a note that they are friendly. As the story progresses, one learns that a combination of corporate interests and political interests created the nightmare scenario of 25 nuclear bombs destroying American cities. America has now divided into several different countries. The question becomes whether the corporate interests will win. The question is where “conservative” concern for internal security will dissolve constitutional freedoms.
It seems difficult for the entertainment industry and the political Left to face the fact that America has an enemy, and the enemy is not corporate interest or political conservatives. It is not the danger of A Handmaid’s Tale, an imposed Christian authoritarianism in the West. Such fears are irrational. However, the political Left is quite willing to destroy Robert Bork, Sarah Pailin, and Rush Limbaugh, and not talk on Fox News, but are willing to show respect to illegitimate leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Al-Qaeda. It seems difficult for many on the political Left to understand that liberty defines America far more than does capitalism or corporations. In fact, this failure to grasp the organizing principle of this country as the idea of liberty is the greatest single failure of the political Left. Americans of all political stripes need to grasp that they have a common enemy; they need to grasp who the enemy is, and they need to face the enemy together.
The denial of American exceptionalism while arguing that America is systemically racist and sexist, arguing that liberal democracies are fascist by nature, an argument made by critical theory, is a path that would deny to the culture in which they live the right to defend itself from aggression. It also does not take seriously the human cost that anti-West movements have perpetrated upon the West, whether in the aggression of the Japanese Empire, Nazis, the Cold War, and Islamic militancy. Such forces are still external enemies to the liberal democracies, embodied in Russia, China, and Islamic militancy. The denial of American exceptionalism fails to appreciate the American cost in lives and wealth to fight back such barbarism. Nonviolence is a worthy strategy when it accomplishes a worthy end. It will work in a culture shaped by freedom. It will not work in a barbarous or tyrannical culture.
Second, nations have developed systems of social organization of wide variety but reflect the values of a liberal democracy or a tyranny.
Human beings are such social creatures that at every stage of human history they create systems of social organization. Various social worlds that we have constructed have inflicted great evil upon the world. Among the tragedies of a human life is that some tyrants and criminals desire the suffering and death of our neighbors and ourselves. Tyrants suspect the motive of good people and therefore oppress them. Most of human history consists of a small few oppressing most people, keeping them at subsistence levels to destroy hope, dreams, worth, and dignity. They create a bond within the country through the external force of fear. Tribal systems, military oriented cultures, and feudal systems, all had oppressed and oppressor systems. In the 20th century, Nazism, Communism, and military dictatorships, led to the loss of millions of lives. Many Europeans have guilt over colonialism. Granting its harmful dimension, the Romans, Persians, Mongols, Egyptians, Turks, Inca, Japanese, Arabs, Sosso, Chinese, Sioux, and countless others have conquered and dominated other peoples. Colonialism is not unique to Europe. Communism killed more people in its history than any other ideology in human history. Conquest and exploitation are the rules of human history rather than the exceptions. Europe also transcended its sins and provided the intellectual ammunition with which to defeat them. It developed the discipline of anthropology, a way of seeing through the eyes of others. The colonial portion of European history died on this contradiction. When colonies demanded independence, they were making an argument that appealed to the moral sentiments of their masters. The colonies learned such moral sentiments from their masters. Europe abolished slavery, abandoned colonialism, defeated fascism, and brought European communism to its knees.
No nation or social system is absolute good or absolute evil. No nation perfected embraces freedom and no notion perfectly oppresses. However, most persons throughout the world live under oppression from Communist regimes, local tyrants, or an Islamic State. The great conflict over the dignity and destiny of the human person, and over the societal order appropriate to that dignity and that destiny, continues.
Yet, Liberal democracy, through its time of guilt and confession of its sins, is opening itself to the new crime of the guilty perspective is to co-exist with the oppressed/oppressor societies of the world.
Saying we live in a politically dangerous world is to say that tyranny will always find freedom a threat. It means that free people must be willing to fight for their freedom. Patrick Henry, on March 23, 1775, put it eloquently:
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! ... Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
The political Right is not eager for war. War is always hell. Political conservatives will differ with each other over when a prudent time for way exists. However, the political conservative recognizes that sometimes, war is the option we have. This should occur only when the enemy threatens the freedom of this nation.
Nations who oppose the United States do not do so because America oppresses them, or because of slavery, or because of colonialism. They oppose America, not because of what it does, but because of who it is. The defining idea of America in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers, is freedom. Talking with such nations will not resolve the issues assumes the enemy has rational reasons for its opposition to the United States.
Third, the basis for world tension involves differences in culture that lead to a violent action toward liberal democracies. Such tyrannies view the freedoms enjoyed in liberal democracies as dangerous.
For many political conservatives, Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996) has made great strides toward understanding the changes in the post-cold war era. He considers the possibility that with the downfall of political ideology as the marker for world politics we are witnessing the emergence of nine civilizations as the divider on the world scene. He identifies them in the following way.
Western civilization, with its common philosophical and religious heritage, has its leading political state in the United States.
The Orthodox civilization of southeastern Europe and the old Soviet republics has its leading political state in Russia. Russia has grown closer to the West than it ever has in its history.
China and parts of southeast Asia form another civilization. He thinks China will dominate the Buddhist civilization of Southeast Asia.
Islam provides a common consciousness for Islamic dominated nations, but so far has yet to provide cohesion among them. Because of this lack of cohesion provided by a core state, it has experienced much intra-Islamic violence between the nations involved. Attempts to unify (Pan-Arab conferences and so on) have failed, so such violence will continue. For him, these are the primary civilizations.
Other civilizations lack core states and remain closely tied to western civilization: Japan, the Hindu civilization of India, Latin American, and Africa.
He considers the possibility that modernization will mean westernization and dismisses it. He thinks that while each of these civilizations can accept many of the scientific and technological advances that modernity brings, they will not necessarily accept the economics and politics that shaped western civilization. A civilization is like an extended family.
The question in this period of world history is not so much which side one is on, as in the cold war period, as who are you. The answer one gives is an important one. Historically, civilizations can decline because of the attacks of barbaric forces or because of internal decay. He thinks the greatest threat to the West is internal decay. For the good of the world, the West needs to re-capture a sense of itself, to know who it is and what it offers.
If Huntington is correct, it argues for a modest approach as we consider the American role in the world. Western civilization, while having Christianity as part of its heritage, has developed secular government, pluralism, tolerance, economic growth, scientific exploration, and democratic institutions. It has sought to embed freedom in its political and cultural institutions. Governments can respect individual rights, and therefore respect the rights of neighboring states. If Fukuyama is right, some form of this respect will find its way into other civilizations, even if it will take a quite different form than it does in the West. My point is that the West needs to do its part by upholding its values, showing the way by being the “city on a hill,” but without the arrogance involved in imposing its vision upon the other civilizations of this world. In fact, in his concluding statement as to what the United States and the West should do, he says that it should not intervene in other civilizations, for such intervention will be the source of instability and global conflict in this multi-civilization world.
No one on the political Right would argue for the suppression of Islam. However, the political Right sees clearly what Islamic states have done. From their perspective, we are the great Satan, largely because of a secular government and freedom. For us, Sharia Law is inhumane. For them, however, we must die, for they have an obligation to make the world obedient to Allah and Sharia Law. The freedom to worship as one pleases is an important value. Yet, some religious traditions have little history of engaging in reasonable discourse with those with whom they disagree. As a result, violence is quickly and easily available as a means of resolving differences. Within Islam, for example, if there were no Israel or west to deal with, Sufi and Sunni Muslims would still resort to violence to resolve that internal conflict. Islamic states have laws that condemn to death anyone who converts from Islam. They have either removed Jews from Iran. Why is it that Jews are constantly argued against in the same way that Nazi’s did during WWII? Why is it that Hindu’s, who are polytheists, continually experience persecution from “Islamic states.” Blasphemy laws are applied to Christians who share their faith and used to condemn them to death. American imam’s will always put a softer face on Islam for the American audience, but the reality is there for those who have the courage to open their eyes and see.
There are Muslims who genuinely believe Islam is a religion of peace and they live that way. The West needs to do what it can to develop alliances with those factions within Islam that want peaceful and tolerant solutions to differences. However, the bloody border of Islam is a reality in this world. The cultural clash between the values of liberal democracy and the values of Islam is real. One could make a compelling case that the efforts of peaceful Muslims to take over the leadership of Islam world-wide has failed. This is why full-scale invasions such as attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan are doomed to fail.
My own hesitancy about the intervention in Iraq had its basis, not in WMD's, but in Islamic culture. I did not see how the aftermath of American involvement in either Afghanistan or Iraq could be successful. Currently, Islam is simply not prepared for the either modernization or democracy. George W. Bush over-reached in his response to 9/11/2001. He did so with the best of intentions and with knowledge of the world as he understood.
American troops, energies, and financial resources ought not to be used for nation-building. Our troops ought to be used to fight and win a war. The military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. It is not designed to build a civilian society.
Thus, we need to bring terrorists to justice, even if we must pursue them in neighborhoods and caves, then we will do so, he stated, unknowingly, the method by which to fight this enemy. They need to have their funds dry up, they need a vigilant America at its airports and seaports, they need a vigilant America tracking its enemy states, and they need special operations military units pursuing them.
Fourth, Americans need to see the Islamic militant for the enemy it is to liberal democracy. We can learn from the difficulty Christianity had in embracing liberal democracy that the path will not be easy and will require courage from within the Islamic community worldwide.
Osama bin Laden secured a fatwa from Shaykh Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahd, a Saudi cleric, in May 2003. In part, it said the following.
Anyone who considers America’s aggressions against Muslims and their lands during the past decades will conclude that striking her is permissible on the basis of the rule of treating one as one has been treated. No other argument need be mentioned. Some brothers have totaled the number of Muslims killed directly or indirectly by their weapons and come up with a figure of nearly ten million. … If a bomb that killed ten million of them and burned as much of their land as they have burned Muslim land was dropped on them, it would be need other arguments if we wanted to annihilate more than this number of them.
Ayman Al-Zwahir made the following statement.
We have not reached parity with them. We have the right to kill four million Americans – two million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons.
Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi said in June 2003, “Not a single Jew will remain in Palestine.” On the matter of the war that militant Islam has declared on the West, the 9/11 Commission Report also made the same conclusion I am making.
Bin Laden and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: To them America is the font of all evil, the “head of the snake, and it must be converted or destroyed.”
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists believed, based upon their experience, that the West was decadent and weak. It would not defend itself. The reason they thought this was that they have been at war since 1979.
As an ideological movement, it has similarity to fascism and Communism. Everything that the West fought for in the Enlightenment period, these people stand against. Long ago, the Middle East and Islam rejected any attempt to move toward Enlightenment. Today, they consider themselves purists in favor of the Islamic triumph over the world. The only morally wrong act is to reject the revolution. The revolution for which they long is Muslims all over the world to join them in an attack upon the West. The guilt of the world rests upon those who do not join their revolution. It will be up to the United States to accept its leadership in the world on behalf of liberty to deal with this challenge. Americans will need to fight for their own future, as well as the future of others.
Islam will not easily admit this, just as Christian leaders found it difficult centuries ago, but it has much to learn. Free elections in Islamic countries would lead to severing ties with the United States and Israel and eventually to a bloody war. Only a change in the minds and hearts of the adherents to Islam will lead to peace and justice.
Christian history in Europe is a violent one. It took Christianity several decades to move from the dominant position it held in Medieval Europe and into the bright sunshine of religious tolerance. This did not happen easily, as the fleeing of people from religious persecution and moving to America, the battle with modern science, and the Thirty Years War on the Continent suggest. It also took courageous Christian thinkers to stand up and oppose the traditional establishment of religion by political states. In contrast to the West of today, the Arab brand of Islam is a medieval enterprise that has looked down upon the decadence of the West for centuries. At the same time, recognizing the difficulty, if the world is to have peace and justice, it will need Islam to make the same transformation that Christianity did in the 1500’s to the 1800’s. I do not think such a transformation can take place through external compulsion. Islamic leaders, Islamic women, and the Arab who believes in a secular government, will need to bring such changes to the area. Such people will need to rebuild Islamic countries. The West has not discovered an effective way to rebuild a liberal democratic Islamic country. Nor do I see the combination of Arab and Muslim equaling democracy anytime soon. When clerics and heads of political parties have militia, democracy cannot happen. When leaders settle disputes by beheading their political and religious opponents, democracy cannot happen.
Islam will need to have secular leaders strong enough to teach it that it can peacefully persuade people to its religion without desiring to impose Islamic law upon the culture, just as Christianity in Europe needed secular leaders to teach it this truth. It will take time and patience to accomplish this, for the masses of Muslims in the world is closer to fundamentalism than they are to a "moderate" brand of Islam. Further, the religious texts of Islam do not lend themselves well to humanism and liberal democracy. Mohammed was a military leader, and at times, a ruthless one. Yet, Islam needs to learn the first rule of religion: do no harm. The masses need to learn that others in the world disagree with their religious beliefs, that it is all right for them to do so, and that intimidating people to silence their disagreement is not a good or godly thing to do. It needs to learn that it can make a positive contribution to the best human life without resorting to worldly force and dominance of a culture. It needs to reject the imposition of Sharia Law upon any nation, including nations with vast Muslim majorities. Muslims need to practice their faith without imposing it upon others. Islam needs to learn to live with the ambiguities the liberty and respect for the worth and dignity of everyone bring.
Fifth, the admitted imperfections of liberal democracies must not lead to the new crimes of failing to see the danger present in tyrannies and religious ideology.
The guilt of the liberal democracies has led to new crimes. Among them, the spread of anti-Semitism, generated by the creation of the state of Israel. its spread on campuses in liberal democracies and among political parties in Europe and America reveals short memories. Islamic leaders explicitly reveal their indebtedness to Nazi propaganda regarding the Jewish people. The atrocities committed against the Jewish people in European history is part of the horror the church imposed upon these people, whom the New Testament considers as chosen by God (Romans 9-11).
The Islamic world in the Middle East perpetuates an anti-Jewish sentiment among their people that would make Hitler proud. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and many Islamic countries call for the destruction of the state of Israel. We need to look honestly at how all too many Arab governments treat their citizens, whether in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or the PLO. If Jews in Israel are paranoid, it is for good reason. If such countries cannot treat their citizens as bearers of individual rights and as persons of worth and dignity, how can either Israel or America hope that they would treat the Jewish people or the American people with worth and dignity? Their own Moslem brothers further oppress Palestinians and sisters in that they are rich in oil money, yet those funds do not flow to the Palestinians to relieve their plight. They suggest that the Arab aggressors are the victims; that the Jews stole Arab land (Israel in fact was created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire); that there is a Palestinian entity that wants peace with the state of Israel (there is none – there is not a single Palestinian leader who supports the existence of Jewish state).
The Palestinians are the only people in history to support in their majority a national death cult, to worship the murderers of little children (including their own) and to proclaim them saints and “martyrs.” Many think the holocaust is a Zionist lie, but also claim that Israel is the new Nazi regime, even while the population of Palestinian Arabs has increased. The father of Palestinian Nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was an acolyte and ally of Hitler who preached the extermination of the Jews and planned to construct his own death camps for Jews in the Middle East. The Islamic terrorist organization Hamas makes no secret of this agenda. Its Egyptian founders and Palestinian inspirers were active followers of Adolf Hitler and enthusiasts of the Nazi Holocaust. The founding charter of Hamas promises, “Islam will obliterate Israel,” memorializes the Egyptian admirer of Hitler, Hassan al-Banna as “the martyr…of blessed memory.” The same document contains the genocidal incitement of the Prophet Mohammed to “kill the Jews,” to hunt them down “until they hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and trees cry out ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” In Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, the West is dealing with a religious version of the axis powers it faced during World War II. They have much of the same anti-Jewish rhetoric, and indeed, they have learned from the Nazi ideology. The miseries Palestinians have suffered are self-inflicted, the inevitable consequence of staking their national ambitions on the genocide of another people, while embracing a death cult for themselves.
One of the issues that exist in the background of any discussion of the Middle East is the crusades of Middle Ages. Jews and Muslims have a right not to forget this history. Yet, Christians must not forget that the reason for the crusades was that Muslim armies had conquered Spain, threatened France, and had advanced upon Vienna, Austria.
Sixth, the danger of imperialism must not blind liberal democracies to the benevolent effect of liberal democracy upon their citizens and upon the world.
Imperialism in its various contemporary forms must be rejected, especially as we see manifested in Russia and China.
Yet, some forms of government have had a benevolent effect upon the population, given the nature of the times in which they existed. This suggests the possibility that the social world can experience a shift in perspective from oppression to that of promoting the general welfare of the people and domestic tranquility.
Liberal democracy represents a protest of oppressed and oppressor social systems. The governed have an investment in the government through voting, strengthening the relationship between individual and community. The tendency of government to become unjust suggests that the combination of respect for individual rights, democracy, and limiting the power of government is the best form of government. Even the much-maligned tendency of the people to divide into many special interest groups may well cripple the ability of the government to enact extremely unjust laws.
Liberal and democratic societies are good societies, recognizing that as human goods, they are always imperfect. Such societies are new on the stage of world history. They are still a minority. Many tyrants, secular and religious, want them destroyed. For such a good society to exist, it will require military strength, for such strength on the world stage is what will determine the course of history.
Seventh, the peaceful goal must not make liberal democracies flinch from when use of violence becomes necessary to protect them.
This is a persistently dangerous world in which the margin for error is slim.
In the Constitution, one of the purposes of the federal government is to “Provide for the common defense.” It refers to maintaining a military sufficient to defend the country from external aggression. One will find it difficult to defend the nation if the initial instinct is to flinch from the use of force. Evil is in the world and the government has a responsibility for avoiding it. Hegel said it well in Reason in History (1837, 1840):
When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even … with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has fallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal stain of corruption. And since this decay is not the work of mere nature, but of human will, our reflections may well lead us to a moral sadness, a revolt of the good will (spirit) - if indeed it has a place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest exemplars of private virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consoling result. … But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises. To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?
I think few would deny the truth Hegel has observed in history. Just as government has the responsibility of providing a context for living good lives, it also has the responsibility for preventing evil to overwhelm its citizens. For these reasons, fascination with pacifism and unilateral disarmament is mystifying. In this imperfect world, violence is not an absolute evil. Rather, we must ask what end the violence serves. If it serves an end that protects liberty, then it serves a good end. If it serves an end of advancing any form of tyranny, it serves an evil end.
A contemplative and mystical view of human history would have us act today as if the ideal of resolving conflicts through discourse were a reality. Good people often idealistically project their goodness upon the world. In the process, they do not see the presence of genuine evil. They do not see properly the need for good people to defend themselves against aggressors. Such an ideal is a worthy one, but we live in this world, where violence will be the answer, whether we want it to be or not. Violence can resolve world-historical problems, sometimes toward evil (communist revolution in the Soviet Union and China, the victory of Islamic militancy in Iran and Afghanistan), and sometimes toward good (American Revolution, American Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and the war against Islamism). War is a plague upon humanity. War has also prevented many more plagues. Pacifism is not a loving act if someone is slaughtering your neighbor and you have the means to stop it, and you do not. I think Hegel expresses a rational, a realistic view of human history. True, tyrants will fall. However, the Assyrian Empire in the Ancient Middle East lasted two centuries, the Babylonian Empire 70 years, the Persian Empire over two centuries, the Empires created by Alexander the Great almost three centuries, and the Roman Empire four hundred years. Such violent empires have impressive longevity. The reason they fall is that other tyrants take their place, and not because somehow humanity learned a lesson. Those who demonstrate greater force will determine the course of human history. The violence that people willingly perpetrate upon each other determines the nature of human relationships. Such a statement is true on the larger canvass of human history. The physical, brute strength of a people will determine the course of world history.
Eighth, has a peaceful Goliath arisen?
Yet, something new has arisen in world history with the rise of America. It will look similar in that violence to establish itself is part of that history. There is a sad history of Indian wars and slavery. Yet, an idea was struggling to be born, eventually embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It is an Enlightenment ideal.
Differences of opinion exist within political conservatism as to how best project American military and economic in the world. These differences will depend upon the analysis one makes of the global order as it exists post-cold war.
President Bush, after 9/11/2001, opted for a proactive American stance, along with some other neo-conservative thinkers like Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz. They assessed the threat presented by Muslim fundamentalists as an elevated risk to the United States and acted accordingly. This view has a high regard for the continuation of the Woodrow Wilson view of the American role in the world. In this view, all human beings long for the freedom that democracy that represents.
Other conservative thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) think that freedom and democracy is the future of the world that evolve of its own course, as nations and cultures are prepared to receive it. America has a role in such a history, but this view is skeptical of the notion of enforcing democracy from outside of a culture. Therefore, this view does not think nation-building is a successful approach to foreign affairs. This brand of conservatism, after involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq, is gaining in respect. It acknowledges the importance of culture providing the necessary moral and intellectual context within which democracy can emerge. Democracy may be the long-term end of human political activity, but it may not be the short-term end of a people. Culture and existing institutions of a nation will determine whether a people are ready for freedom and democratic institutions. In a sense, the argument of Fukuyama argues that what is universal is the desire to improve the human condition on this planet. Modern life, with its technology, high standard of living, health care, and so on, provides for such improvement. As the culture embraces such activities, it will eventually want to embed freedom in its culture and institutional life in the way liberal democracy has done.
The emergence of American power is a unique reality in world history. The fact that America does not impose its will or form of government upon other lands and does not seek an empire throughout the world is a unique fact of history. It shows the American character, oriented as it is toward what is best for others – their freedom – as well as what is best for itself. American policy recognizes the benefit global freedom and peace is to itself, and therefore desires it to reside in the institutions of others. The generosity of Americans in charitable giving and in government giving throughout the world testifies to the generosity of the American people. The fact that people from all over the world want to be here, whether legally or illegally, suggests that America has qualities other people want. The American internal debate between the Left and Right should begin on the common ground of the greatness of the American achievement in the world.
American military and economic power are undeniable in the world today. Citizens need to ponder carefully what this means. Michael Mandelbaum (The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century, 2005) makes the point that the American economy is the engine of the world and American military might provides an umbrella that keeps other nations from fighting. He offers the example of Europe, an area of the world plagued historically by war. However, with the dissolving of the Soviet Union, he thinks an American military presence on the continent accomplishes two worthy objectives. One is that it reassures the people of American commitment to the area. It provides stability within which these nations can face disagreements without the threat of one nation attacking the other. Two is that it provides a base from which to offer a degree of deterrence for the Middle East. He offers a compelling case that the humanitarian use of military might by Clinton in the Balkans and Somalia and the preventative war use of the military by Bush in Iraq have both failed to prove themselves as viable uses of American military might.
America could be a new type of “empire” or “Goliath,” one that is a benign power, providing a structure of economic (free economies and free trade) and military (keeping the resort to war at minimal levels) that will benefit the world. It does not desire the power of an empire over others, recognizing that many people concerned with the power America has simply will not believe it. America must not use its power to impose democratic institutions anywhere. America does desire that the values of economic and political freedom become the property of all nations. America must discern when real threats to its freedoms face it, and then use its military force for the moral purpose of defending freedom and human rights.
None of the past few paragraphs is a given for the future. America must earn that future by keeping its economic house in order and keeping a strong military discipline. It must not gamble away its future by bringing liberal democracy to every nation. It can only stand as a witness to the possibility that nations can internally have vigorous debates and resolve them in ways that honor the worth and dignity of citizens and thereby honors a consensual and pluralistic civil and political society that still has freedom at its core.
