PrintSeptember 24, 2009
The blessings of Pax Americana, the good cop
Yesterday at the United Nations, Barack Obama renounced Pax Americana, signaling an end to the United States' role as global cop.
Albert Einstein was a lifelong pacifist until Hitler came along. Then, after fleeing for his very life from Nazi Germany he became the man who told the FDR White House about nuclear bombs, together with physicist Leo Szilard, to get the Manhattan Project started. That letter to FDR was dated August 2, 1939. It warned that "extremely powerful bombs of a new type may ... be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."
Einstein loved peace, but when reality forced him to choose he signed that letter to FDR because he was afraid that Hitler would get there first. Today we are facing Einstein's choice again. There is a genocidal regime in Tehran. They follow an ideology of unapologetic imperialistic expansionism, marked by hundreds of thousands of mind-numbed followers chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel!" -- every single day since 1979. All the liberals are in full denial. They say all those chants don't really mean anything. They are not fully sane.
The Middle East now has the closest thing to Adolf Hitler since World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is now within a year of having nukes in his grasp. Already they have ballistic missiles, built to carry nukes. That regime has been tested in a long and bloody war with Iraq in which a million people died. That war experience hasn't stopped their bloodthirsty actions; they glorify martyrdom. The Tehran regime routinely kills and tortures its own people, as a matter of policy in the name of God.
Meanwhile our own president is proclaiming the end of Pax Americana, the most successful peace-keeping policy in human history. He publicly denies the plain and obvious lessons of history. The fascist regime in Tehran would not even exist were it not for the abject failures of another president in exactly the same mold, the blighted Jimmy Carter.
Einstein saw his own people murdered by the millions before beginning to understand reality well enough to sign that letter to FDR. Since that day in 1939, the United States has come to be the guarantor of peace in the world. Yes, the Soviet Union killed more German soldiers than any other combatant in World War II. But if Stalin had his druthers the USSR would have been a Nazi ally, as the Hitler-Stalin pact promised to do, to split up Poland and to allow the Nazi war machine to turn west and conquer all of Europe.
The United States came into the war not because it wanted to control the world, like Stalin's USSR, but because totalitarian aggression gave us no choice. That is the origin of Pax Americana, which has kept the peace in most of the world most of the time since 1946.
Obama doesn't believe it. He is a victim of revisionist Leftists, who deliberately twist the plain and obvious facts. So Obama is historically (and therefore morally) wrong. You can't get it right if you flip the facts.
We keep forgetting the most vital lessons of history. A big one is that you need a Good Cop to keep the peace. That's why we have cops on our streets. We trust them, because they are generally admirable and trustworthy. There is no international police force we can trust. What we have instead is a "superpower" -- the US -- which is supported, when push comes to shove, by all the other countries that know they can only thrive in a stable world.
Obama doesn't get this, even though it's obvious. Obama believes he has a higher calling. He believes the Cold War was a result of American aggression. That is false and deluded.
Guess who's amazingly naive today? After this White House gets done fixing the best health care system in the world, along with phony global warming, they are going to solve the problem of world peace once and forever.
It's not comforting to have a president in charge who has absolutely no concept of history; who has in fact flipped it all upside-down.
Hitler would have used nukes simply for the blood and glory, and so might Ahmadinejad today. We don't know what he is going to do when he gets a bomb, but judging by the hundreds of peaceful protesters he just had killed, raped, and tortured, who is going to gamble on the answer? I sure hope the Israelis don't. I hope the US does not, but Obama's abject bowing to medieval tyrants makes it more likely for aggressors to gamble on war.
I wouldn't place a bet on the peaceful intentions of that gruesome little freak in Tehran. Can you see Obama shaking hands with A'jad after all the bloody massacres in Tehran? He would do it, too, if he didn't think we were watching.
For sixty centuries most human beings have been willing to trade their freedom to buy even a little security. That's the only choice they had. The Romans seemed to be relatively good cops as long as you let them rule. That is why the Roman Empire became the ideal for Europe to this very day. Compared to the Saracens and the Huns, even European princes were relatively good cops. The British Empire was a good cop compared to the alternatives, including the indigenous Maharajas and Sultans of the Empire.
The American Non-Empire --- what kind of "empire" is this, anyway? --- is far and away the best cop in world history, bringing the longest period of world peace (since 1948), the widest spread of freedom and democracy, the freest economies ever known, and as a direct result, the greatest world-wide prosperity from China to Brazil. Yes, we've seen horrific tyrannies and wars since 1948 --- but they have been local. No repeat of the Thirty Year War, of the Napoleonic mass wars, 1848, 1878, 1914, 1932, and in spite of decades of Cold War, no imperial expansion by Stalin and Mao Zedong. The Cold War stayed cold, a damned good thing. The Europeans have turned their armies into welfare programs. We were invited to rescue them when the Balkans blew up during the Clinton years. The Middle East is always on a low boil, but it never blows up. (So far.)
The same goes for Asia. Koreans still hate Japan because of the horrific actions of the Japanese armies in World War Two. So do the Chinese. But they haven't come to blows. They understand that they are benefiting from the Good Cop of Pax Americana. Just let the US Navy withdraw from Asia and watch the Japanese getting a nuclear bomb, the Chinese invading Taiwan, and a new age of armed alliances emerging. Democratic governance only spread in Asia after the US victory over Japan. Before that it was tried by Sun Yat Sen and failed.
Who would you like to be guarding the world instead of the United States? The UN? China or Russia? Europe? Well, let them call the UN Human Rights Commission the next time they have a problem. (That would be Iran, the Sudan, and Libya.)
For sixty years the troubles have been kept local and regional. That is an unprecedented achievement for the United States. Those facts are all around us.
Everybody knows it -- our allies, fake allies, enemies and friends. It's hard to tell who's who, but every time they get a choice between American leadership and anything else, they choose us. Then they go home and bitch about it.
It's either Pax Americana, nuclear war, or tyranny.
Everybody knows that except Obama. But as soon as Obama actually starts to bet on others to keep the peace, watch ‘em haring off over the horizon.
When will reality hit this White House? We can't tell.
All we know is that a harsh reality is bound to hit them some time soon. Either Obama will persist in his delusional course, or he will have to come off his high horse and deal with it. FDR and Truman were two liberals who did. Jimmy Carter failed miserably because he didn't get it.
If Obama fails to understand the next big international challenge his will be a failed presidency. He seems to be failing on domestic policy. If he also blows it in world politics, the American people will vote against him in 2010 and 2012. One Jimmy Carter is enough.
We can do better than this.
