Appesement

In 1989, Paul Smith, the Principal of Layton High, asked me if I would put on a Patriotic Assembly for the student body. As a Boy Scout camp staffer and camp director, I had participated in hundreds of patriotic assemblies, so I agreed, on condition that Mr. Smith ask the entire faculty to attend and disperse themselves throughout the auditorium. They would be there. The assembly would start, as all our assemblies do, with a flag ceremony. I had noticed that the students were not quiet or respectful during the presentation of the colors or the pledge. I had and idea of how to fix that. My son Bryon was a Cub Scout, and I arranged for his den to come to the high school to present the colors. I warned him that the students would be talking while he was trying to preset the colors, and told him to stop, lean into the microphone and say, “Would you please be quiet and show respect to the flag of our country.” I was just as I predicted, the student body was all achatter, Bryon paused, leaned over to bring his lips close to the mike, and clearly and forcefully deliver the rebuke. Believe me, nothing shuts up sixteen year olds like getting scolded by an eight year old; you could have heard a pin drop for the rest of the ceremony. As Debate Coach, I enlisted the help of my team. I wrote a little skit though which our Team President, Trent Warner, was able to relate Rulion Skinner’s story of about seeing the flag upside down out of his high school window in the early days of WWII. Telling how within a year all three of the teachers who set it right had died fighting for our freedom. I had three veterans, from the Layton High faculty and staff, talk about their service. Our Agriculture Teacher put together a slide show which flashed pictures of America as the music played “I’m Proud to Be an America”. I had printed out the words to “God Bless America” and the first verse of the National Anthem. Every one got a hand out, and when it was time to sing they all had the words. After the slide show, we sang the national anthem. Then the Captain of the Football Team, Chris Trijieo, stood to tell his class mates how he felt about his country. As he spoke, his voice broke with emotion. Someone in the crowd jeered. “Shut up,” Chris demanded; once again – absolute silence. At the end of the assembly, we all stood to sing God Bless America. There were many tears and the room was filled with a beautiful emotion, joy and pride in our country.

I walked back to my room feeling quite the success. In the hall across from my classroom I was accosted by a colleague. She flatly stated that what I had done reminded her of Hitler. I had manipulated the emotions of the students; she went on to remind me of the murder of the Indians and the evils of Vietnam, then marched off to her class room. There were other complaints, and it would be after 9/11 before we had another patriotic assembly.

It is my belief that Western greatness go back to Achilles, and to every Western man’s desire to be Achilles. Achilles chose a life of Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom, he choose to voyage home to his grandchildren, yet unborn. But when Justice demanded it, he stayed and died fighting for the truly good.

I have long contemplated the “fall of Rome” and long ago came to the conclusion that Rome fell because the Romans were no longer willing to fight for it, that they valued other things more than Roman. I have just finished a book by Bruce S. Thornton called The Wages of Appeasement. Of the many themes he presents, the one that most struck me reinforces this opinion. Thornton’s three chapters, together with his introduction and conclusion, map the fate of those who fail to do their duty. Thornton begins with a discussion of the accession to power over the Greek States of accomplished by Philip of Macedon, he then reviews the disaster of Britain’s attempt to appease Hitler, and ends with an examination of the danger the United States faces from Islamic Terrorism.

As Americans, as the latest incarnation of Rome, as the heirs to Achilles, we value Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom, but we are making two mistakes. First, that Americans are entitled to and can always have these treasures without sacrifice. Second, that all other peoples want these things as well, and can be appeased, bribed out of their goals, by promising them what we have. I wonder if we will survive our errors.

I wish you, who ever you are, would read Thornton’s book, but I know time is short, so I have reduced his 283 pages into something less than twenty.

The Temptation of Hector (Introduction)

In May of 2008, President Bush ignited a political firestorm when in a speech to the Israeli parliament he compared some Democratic politicians to England’s Neville Chamberlain and his disastrous policy of appeasing Hitler: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” (pg xi)

. . . the Roman historian Livy defined as history’s important function: to offer from the past models of “base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” (pg xiii)

The fear of death and violence inherent in human nature is a constant across time and space, as Homer shows us. Hector’s fear, however, is justified, as he knows he can never defeat Achilles in battle and that his own death means the destruction of Troy. (pg xiv)

Hector’s decision to await Achilles, his refusal to give in to the temptation of appeasement, and his last valiant charge at Achilles even as he know he is doomed are all fueled by honor and its corollary, shame at dishonor. (pg xvii)

Athens and Philip II (Chapter One)

Demosthenes calls on the Athenians to throw aside their “disinclination to do our duty” and instead to act, rather than indulging their “insolence,” “indifference and carelessness,” and “outrageous and incurable slothfulness.” He exhorts them to stop taking thought first for private “pleasure” and allowing self-serving politicians to weaken their civic courage by exploiting their apathy: “The politicians hold the purse-strings and manage everything, while you, the people, robbed of nerve and sinew, stripped of wealth and allies, have sunk to the level of lackeys and hangers-on, content if the politicians gratify you with a dole from the Theoric Fund or a [religious] procession.” (56)

We must make provision for defense, I mean with war-galleys,, funds, and men; for even if all other states succumb to slavery, we surely must fight the battle of liberty.” (58)

Demosthenes repeatedly emphasizes throughout this period that the Athenians are more concerned with their domestic entitlements and pleasures then with protecting their interests and freedom through the provision of funds for defense and through personal service. In his first speech addressing the threat of Philip, the first Phillippic of 351, he scolded the Athenians for efficiently organizing and funding their festivals, with enthusiastic participation of all the citizens, while their military expeditions are mismanaged and starved of resources. These misplaced priorities reflect the decay of political virtue that hamstrung Athens in its confrontation with an aggressive autocrat. (59)

Finally, the decay of political virtue is the most important factor in the loss of Greek freedom. That is, the failure of an important ideal – rather than the attempt to implement some utopian program, such as pacifism in the 1920’s destroyed the foundations of virtue and character upon which political freedom rests and left the Greeks venerable to the aggressor. Citizens who see the state as a source of largess rather than as their own “common thing” in whose defense they must sacrifice their lives and treasure, will be loath to take up the duties and make the scarifies required to protect freedom against those who would destroy it. (pgs 62-63)

England and Germany (Chapter Two)

Once again, throughout this period economic self-interest and political constraints were an important factor in England’s behavior. At the time of the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 and 1922, England’s economy was ailing, suffering from foreign competition and high unemployment. In addition, interest payment on the national debt, which by 1927 was 172 percent of gross domestic product, reached 40 percent of government spending by the late Twenties. At the same time, demands for increasing spending on social welfare programs were increasing. Many politicians agreed with Prime Minister Lloyd George, who “defended spending on social programs both as part of his program to make England ‘a land fit for heroes,’ and as part of a more urgent plan to placate a restless and increasingly unhappy populace. He was, therefore, much less likely to accept cuts in government programs in housing, for instance, than to cut the military.” (pg 86)

This utopian ideal, abetted by a growing pacifism and faith in collective security . . . was enshrined in Article 8 of the Versailles Treaty, regarding the functions of the League of Nations: “The Members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations. . . . The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections. The Council shall advise how the evil effects attendant upon such manufacture can be prevented. . . . And of course, as we today continue to experience in international attempts to disarm a nuclear North Korea or prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, international agreements or monitors, absent the threat of force, will not deter states eager to possess weapons. (pg 87)

Hitler correctly calculated that he could now blatantly rearm and so no longer needed negotiation and multinational treaties to achieve his goals and camouflage his activities. The failure of the Disarmament Conference illustrates once again that a reliance on diplomatic talk is vitaited (polluted) by the simple fact that any sovereign nation can just stop talking when talk no longer serves its interest. (88)

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, then, the ground for German expansion had already been prepared by over a decade of appeasement fueled by fear, shortsighted national interests, and delusional idealism. (90)

. . . Japan resigned from the League in protest. Any shrewd aggressor could see that the League was nothing but a mechanism for dressing inaction in the rhetorical robes of utopian internationalism, and became even more obvious during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), when Italy and Germany blatantly provided men and arms to the Nationalists while the League remained neutral. (92)

Here is an important danger of failing to resist hostile actions: any act of appeasement empowers not just one, but any number of other aggressors who may be watching from the sidelines and calculating chances. (pg 98)

. . . “ Mussolini,” Churchill wrote, “like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman, who at the worst would only bluster, and was anyhow incapable of making war.” (98)

The left was particularly pusillanimous, one newspaper writing, “Hitler has torn up a treaty, he has broken all his promises, but at the same time he speaks of peace and Geneva [i.e., disarmament]. We must take him at his word.” (101)

However, as Churchill later wrote, “Virtuous montages, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war.” (101)

“Only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly seventy millions of the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war and conquest as a glorious exercise, and death in battle as the noblest fate of man. There is a nation which abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective might. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtues, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by Parliament or by public opinion. . . Now they are rearming with the utmost speed and ready to their hands is this new lamentable weapon of the air, against which our Navy is no defense, before which women and children, the weak and the frail, the pacifist and the jingo, the warrior and the civilian, the front line trench and the cottage home, lie in equal and impartial peril.” Churchill ( pgs 108-109)

Chamberlain was horrified by the possibility of war, however, and still deluded about the ability of diplomatic negotiation to defuse a crisis, as well a nursing a vain faith in the power of his personality and negotiating skills. . . . Chamberlain’s delusional assumption that Hitler was a man like himself, interested in peace and amenable to reasoned negotiation, coupled to his personal vanity and the culture-wide fear of war, all found in diplomatic discussion and convenient excuse for avoiding hard facts and making hard decisions. (pgs 114-115)

Fear, misguided idealism, and shortsighted national interests had paved the way for the most destructive war in history, one whose victory ultimately rested as much with luck and Hitler’s mistakes as with the heroic efforts and sacrifices of the Allies. Hard upon this struggle, moreover, came the Cold War and the confrontation with an expansionary, nuclear-armed Soviet Union that the war had turned into a superpower, a conflict that risked human civilization itself. Political freedom was indeed saved from fascism, but at the cost of horrors the effects of which still shape our world today. (pg 119)

The Pacifist Delusion

Also important were organization such as the London Peace Society, which like Tolstoy, whom it called “the foremost and most uncompromising Peace advocate in the world,” believed in societal transformation to abolish not just war but social ills such as alcoholism, slavery, prostitution, and brutal imprisonment. Significantly for the interwar period we are examining, these organizations focused on establishing international organizations and laws that used arbitration codified in treaties to diffuse conflict, at the same time that they agitated for disarmament. Finally equally important for the social and political mood that facilitated policies of appeasement in the Thirties were the socialist and labor movements . . . these movements saw war between states as a violation of their universalistic ideal of human brotherhood and an expression of capitalism’s inherent corruption. “Only when countries adopt a Socialist form of government,” said British Labour [sic.] Party leader George Lansbury in1937, “will the world be finally secure for peace.” . . . George Orwell commented on the pacifism and antimilitarism pervasive in the postwar (WWI) period, particularly among those who were too young to have fought: “Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies. For years after the war, to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened’. 1914 – 1918 was written off as meaningless slaughter, and even the men who had been slaughtered were held to be in some way to blame.” . . . [and there was] famed physicist Albert Einstein, who in 1928 advised people not to participate in any war, for any reason.” (pgs 128-130)

Here we see concentrated all the false knowledge and received wisdom of the previous decades, also evident in the ideas of Nevile Chamberlain and other appeasers: the demonization of the Versailles Treaty as an act of irrational revenge against Germany; faith in unilateral disarmament as the way to create peace; and the delusional view of human nature—even for dictators clear about their aggressive aims—as essentially rational, peace-loving, and fair-minded, and thus amenable to the negotiated settlement of conflict and appeasement of grievances. (pg 131)

Winston Churchill made the connection between pacifism and this malaise in 1936: “We view with the strongest reprehension activities like those of [Labor Party leader] Mr. Lansbury and Canon [Dick] Sheppad, who are ceaselessly trying to dissuade the youth of this country from joining its defensive forces, and seek to impede and discourage the military preparations which the state of the world forces upon us.” (pg 131)

They assumed that people universally were reasonable and capable ration all of determining their true interests, these being a peace and prosperity generated by global free trade. Norman Anbgell, in his influential The Great Illusion (1910), argued that in a world united by trade, finance, and industry, nationalism and the pursuit of national interests through war were irrational because they were unprofitable. This argument took for granted, however, that all people were able to cultivate their reason and recognize their true interests, which turned out to be those of liberal-democratic Europeans. . . . Yet the whole history of mankind demonstrated that war was not a distortion of a pacific, rational human nature, and anomaly reflecting the temporary ascendancy of their rational or a cabal of evil rulers, but rather an instrument by which states pursued their various perceived interests, whether these be rational or irrational, interests moreover shard by a critical mass of people who did the fighting and dying. In short, history demonstrates that, as Plato’s Cleinias put it in the Laws, peace is “only a name; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other.” (pgs 134-135)

International idealism, in short, fails because the primary objective of a sovereign nation is to pursue its interests, not to adhere to some abstract, universal ideal of right or justice. As George Washington said, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.” (pg 137)

The climate was the increasing estrangement, if not active dislike, that many in England, particularly among the political and cultural elite, felt toward their own country and its institutions, a loss of faith in the goodness of their own way of life that made it more difficult for many to find the will to fight, kill, and die for those beliefs until it was nearly too late. . . (pg140)

The rise of communism and socialism, which opposed the democratic liberalism and free-market capitalism defining England by the late nineteenth century, attracted many and perforce turned them to some degree against their own country and its institutions. Socialism, moreover, was an internationalist, antinationalist creed, and so reinforced the internationalist idealism. . . H. G. Wells, for example, protested against “the teaching of patriotic histories that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making tradition of the past and novelist J. B. Priestly considered patriotism “as a might force, chiefly used for evil.” (pg 141)

. . . George Orwell noted in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941): “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality, In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” (pg 143)

Winston Churchill had said. . . “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come form the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?” . . . “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nation are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralyzed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final.” (pg 144)

And when a civilization that has lost its faith in its country as something worth killing and dying for, is confronted with one that has a powerful belief in the righteousness and superiority of its way of life, then no amount of material power, whether economic or military, can compensate for that loss. (pg 145)

America and Jihad (Chapter Three)

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich is dominant in the twentieth century. The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a suddenly resurgent fan-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth. Such people—and there are many of them in the world today—choose passivity and retreat, anything if only the life to which they are accustomed might go on, anything so as not to have to cross over to rough terrain today, because tomorrow, see, everything will be all right. (But it never will! The reckoning for cowardice will only be more cruel. Courage and the power to overcome will be ours only when we dare to make sacrifices.) Alexander Solzhenitsyn (pg 147)

Vietnam Syndrome

It should be remembered that the debacle in Southeast Asia was not a consequence of military defeat, but of a political failure of nerve. (pg 149)

. . . South Vietnamese were in a position to hold their own as long as they continued to have American air support and military resources. When in August 1973 the Democratic-controlled Congress cut off that support and drastically reduced military aid, a North Vietnam armed and backed by the Soviet Union and China overran the South. The cost of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory was of course most grievous for the South Vietnamese: In addition to the 750,000 killed during the war, a million “boat people” fled their so-called liberators, 65,000 political enemies were executed, and another 250,000 died in “reeducation” camps. (pg 150)

“Vietnam syndrome”— doubt about America’s goodness and power, and fear of casualties and foreign “quagmires”— that made the U.S. hesitant to act abroad in support of its national interests and international commitments, just as memories of the Great War’s carnage had had a “paralyzing effect on British generals in the decades before World War II. (pg 151)

The election of Jimmy Carter as President in 1976 put into the White House this new vision of America’s place in the world as less reliant on military power and clandestine activities in order to protect the national interest. And more committed to open diplomacy, negotiating, and a moralizing posture in international affairs. . . Carter believed in the power of principled example to affect the behavior of other nations, even those bent on our destruction and utterly contemptuous of our political principles. Thus defending and promoting human rights, acting abroad in accord with the principles of the U. S. Constitution, and disarmament became the foundations of his foreign policy, all predicated on an acceptance of American limitations and guilt seemingly validated by the fiasco of Vietnam and the depredations of the CIA, both at home and abroad. (pg 154)

These were the ideas Carter laid out in his inaugural address, where he acknowledged the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled Americans not to “dwell on remembered glory,” and reminded his fellow citizens that “even our great nation has it recognized limits” and can only “simply do its best.” . . . a few years later in the infamous “crisis of confidence” or “malaise” speech—Carter stressed that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute,” promised that “we will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home,” and pledged “perseverance and wisdom in our efforts to limit the world’s armaments to those necessary for each nation’s own domestic safety.” . . . Left unexplained was how these lofty goals and the acceptance of America’s limits could be squared with international disarmament or advancing human rights, ideals that required some level of interference in the business of other nations; or with keeping America safe in a world were a nuclear-armed aggressive enemy pursued its aims with none of America’s inhibitions and with complete indifference to the persuasive power of what we saw as our superior “moral principles.” (pgs 154-155)

Regimes now were to be supported not because they served American interests in countering Soviet aggression, but rather on the basis of their “progressive” posture and anti-colonialist, liberationist rhetoric. The international face of this policy was Carter’s United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, “whose frequent ideological sorties on behalf of radical Third World regimes were sometimes indistinguishable form the pronouncements of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.”. . . More dangerously, he (Carter) pursued arms control treaties with the Soviet Union at the same time he ordered unilateral cutbacks in American weapons development in hopes the Soviets would reciprocate. . . Carter’s delays and cancellations of weapons such as the B1 bomber were met with a Soviet military buildup rather than reciprocal reductions. (pg 156)

Finally, Carter’s focus on human rights created the perception that the United States had abandoned the policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union, and so smaller countries faced with communist aggression could no longer depend on American support unless they conformed to American moral standards no matter how dangerous or inappropriate those might be for any particular country’s security—or for America’s own security and interests. (pg 157)

Thus the Shah was presented as another such oppressor, whose depredations had awakened a justified attempt at liberation and nationalist self-determination, a bit of leftist received wisdom that Teddy Kennedy exploited in his brief run against Carter in 1980 presidential primaries. “The shah ran one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind,” the historically challenged Senator said at a press conference, decrying the “umpteen billion dollars stolen from Iran” and calling for an “open debate” to examine America’s support of the Shah’s regime. (pg 160)

. . . Carter’s advisers continued to underestimate the impact of religious fervor on events. . . Evident in this assessment are the priority given to material, secular interests, such as running a government and delivering material boons and personal freedom to the people, and the naïve belief that because the Islamists were “religious,” they shared the same moral values as the West and the same view of “social justice, “and that this would provide the foundation for mutually beneficial dialogue. . .” (pg 162)

. . . Khomeini heaped scorn on Western notions of freedom, a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom. This is the freedom you [secular intellectuals] want; and this is a dictate for abroad that you have imposed. You do not believe in any limits to freedom. You deem license to be freedom.” . . . Khomeini particularly condemned the trappings of this corrupt freedom introduced by the Shah’s liberalizing programs: mixed-sex education and recreation, bars, discos, television, movies, popular music, Western fashion, divorce for women, secular law and government—all were symptoms of “Westoxification.” (pg 165)

Even more troubling than the U. S. dismissal of the religious origins of the revolution was the failure to understand the role of violent jihad in Kohmeini’s program to battle the forces of Western idolatry and materialism and restore the global greatness of Islam. In 1942, Khomeini had written, “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.” Khomeini explicitly identifies this process as a violent one: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam councils against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!” After he took power, Khomeini reiterated his jihadist program: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword for crushing the traitors and the Koran for guidance. . . . Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.” The goal of this jihad, moreover, was the global triumph of Islam: “We shall export our revolution,” Khomeini promised, “to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no God but God’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.” (pg 166)

Carter’s belief that rational negotiations and compromise could establish peaceful relations with the infant Islamic Republic was as delusional as Chamberlain’s notion that Hitler’s grand aims for the German empire based on racial purity would be satisfied by the negotiated sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. (pg 167)

Comes Clinton

. . . under President Clinton, restrictions on the CIA were tightened. . . . Equally harmful to our ability to uncover terrorist plots was Attorney General Janet Reno’s 1995 interpretation of the FISA Act, which led to regulations creating an artificial divide between national security and criminal investigations out of the fear that criminal prosecutions would be contaminated by the illegal use of intelligence gathered by the CIA. This interpretation created difficulties for those investigating terrorist who have committed crimes and thus are of interest both to national security agencies and criminal prosecutors. (pgs 176-177)

Moreover, bin Laden perceived that since the abandonment of Vietnam, the United States was spiritually impoverished and hence vulnerable to terrorist intimidation. “The Americans did not get out of Vietnam,” bin Laden preached, “until after they suffered great losses. Over sixty thousand [sic] American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine until be give them a lot of blows. They won’t stop until we do jihad against them.” . . . Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags,” Wright summarizes bin Laden’s theme, “Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death.” In bin Laden’s view, American fear, bred of spiritual poverty, would in turn produce American appeasement. (pgs 184-185)

The Bush Doctrine

After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the murder of 2,973 Americans on 9/11, the United States under President George Bush seemingly had cast off the appeasing delusions of the previous 30 years. The President’s address to Congress on September 20 was a vigorous repudiation of the appeasing policies that had allowed al Qaeda and bin Laden to confirm their estimation of American weakness and fear: “Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” The President also put on notice the nations, most obviously Afghanistan, that had harbored the terrorists: “And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In this same speech, Bush put the ultimatum to the Taliban that Clinton should have after the Cole bombing. And when the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, in October the war began. By December, the Taliban and al Qaeda were routed, through not definitively destroyed. (pgs 198-199)

. . . attacks on the efforts to end the 20-year-long failures and dysfunction that led to 9/11 were nothing compared to the firestorm of criticism that met President Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The wisdom of heeding Demosthenes’s advice to the Athenians not to wait for blows like a bad boxer but to anticipate and preempt them became all too clear in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failure of those entrusted with our safety to connect the dots” and take action against the terrorists. In the case of Iraq, there were many “dots” to connect: Hussein’s past record of aggression against his neighbors and brutal oppression of his own people, as many as 300,000 of whom were executed and buried in mass graves; his violation of 16 U. N. resolutions and the terms of the ceasefire ending the first Gulf War; his continuing evasion of his responsibility to reveal his weapons of mass destruction programs, culminating in the ejection of U. N. weapons inspectors form Iraq in 1998; his past record of using chemical weapons against the Iranians and Kurds; the public relations nightmare of the U. N. sanctions, which even bin Laden mentioned as evidence of American hostility to Muslims, claiming “one million innocent children have been killed”; the corruption of the U. N. food-for-oil program, which provided billions for Hussein to finance the reconstitution of his weapons programs; the weakening resolve of U. N. Security Council members France and Russia for maintaining the sanctions; the cost and dangers to U. S Air Force personnel of enforcing the northern and southern “no fly” zones created to protect the Kurds and Shiites, Hussein’s political enemies and victims; and Hussein’s record of giving aid and succor to numerous terrorists, including the vicious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal and future bin Laden Lieutenant abu Musab al-Zarquwi. (pg 201)

For all these reasons, removing Hussein had been official U. S. foreign policy since 1998, when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Law, which stated “that it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.” (pgs 201-202)

However, to a left mired in its ancient narratives of American global oppression, the war was like Vietnam, just another episode in a fascist power’s imperialist adventurism in the service of capitalist profits and exploitation of Third World resources. Even before the war started, the left had added the coming conflict in Iraq to its roster of anti-globalization and anti-Israel protest. In October 2002, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had appeared at rallies across the country. At them, David Horowitz writes, “Spokesmen denounced America as a ‘rogue state’ and a ‘terrorist state,’ likened the president to Adolf Hitler, equated the CIA with al Qaeda, described America’s purpose as ‘blood for oil’ and called for “revolution.’” . . . The rallies and protests displayed the reflexive anti-Americanism of the international left, with its Marxist clichés about “imperialism” and “colonialism” and the evils of capitalism. Worse yet were the expressions of support for the enemy and disregard for the lives of the protesters’ fellow citizens who would soon be fighting in Iraq. At a teach-in at Columbia University in March, an anthropology professor hoped for America’s defeat and “a million Mogadishus,” evoking the 1993 killing of 18 American Servicemen in Somalia. Bin Laden could not have said it better. (pg 203)

The Democrats Politicize the War

. . . in June of 2003 Dean announced his candidacy for the nomination with another repudiation of the Iraq War: “But there is a fundamental difference between the defense of our nation and the doctrine of preemptive war espoused by this administration. The President’s group of narrow-minded ideological advisors are undermining our nations greatness in the world. They have embraced a form of unilateralism that is even more dangerous than isolationism. . . . Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, both of whom had voted for the war and soon were decrying the very conflict they had publicly supported. . . Democrats justified this politically convenient shift usually by indulging the magical thinking that “diplomacy,” no matter how often it had failed in the past, could have definitively neutralized the threat from Hussein: “I’m saddened,” senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle had said days before the war began, “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” The Democratic candidates, in the words of the New York Times, now “offered a near-unified assault . . . on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq war.” Alleging “unsubstantiated evidence” in the President’s argument for going to war, lamenting the casualties in Iraq, and predictably complaining about his “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war,” even though Bush had spent several months attempting to get the U. N. to lend a hand in restoring its own tarnished credibility as a force for global order. (pg 204)

This was the beginning, Horowitz writes, of “a Democratic offensive against the war’s commander in chief, which would be pursued relentlessly and without letup for the next year, becoming the focus of the presidential campaign.” The media colluded in this assault, emphasizing casualties, civilian dead, military mistakes, and all the other unfortunately typical by products of modern warfare. When the war started, CNN reporter Pet Arnett let the media bias cat out of the bag when he was caught telling Iraqi television that “our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.” Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the Democrats’ relapse into the pre-9/11 posture of American self-loathing and retreat was the enthusiastic presence of Democratic leaders such as Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at the premier of Michael Moore’s anti-American cinematic libel Fahrenheit 9-11 in June 2004. Moore’s myopic, far-left ideology is obvious in a comment he made that same month about the terrorists who were murdering Americans and their fellow Iraqis: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Such rooting for the enemy killing American soldiers did not hinder former President Jimmy Carter, who along with former Vice-President Al Gore was leading the partisan attack on Bush, from inviting Moore to sit next to him at the Democratic National convention in 2004. Factional political interest abetted by the liberal media thus facilitated a return to the Vietnam-era Democratic Party’s aversion to military force and hostility to its own country, along with its naïve faith, evidenced by Democrats’ complaints about Bush’s “unilateralism” and “failed diplomacy,” in the same diplomatic agreements and transnational organizations that had failed to contain Saddam Hussein for 12 years, let alone keep American safe from terrorists. (pg 205)

Senator Barack Obama called the surge “a mistake” and a “reckless escalation,” and introduced legislation to remove all U. S. combat forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Bush calling the surge “a serious mistake,” while Democrats in both houses introduced non-binding resolutions rejecting the surge. Worst of all was Senator Reid’s announcements in April 2007 that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” A few months later Joseph Biden concurred: “We need to stop the surge and start to get our troops out.” (pg 208)

Obama Nation

In short, Obama’s foreign policy represented a return to the Carter philosophy that had helped put in power as Islamist regime in Iran and ignited the Soviet global expansion in Afghanistan, Latin America, and central Africa. As Arthur Herman wrote in January 2009, Obama came into office “trailing clouds of Carterite rhetoric and Carteresque ideas about the inutility of military force, the sovereign worth of ‘aggressive diplomacy’ (an incoherent and meaningless phrase), and the need to accommodate ourselves to a world in which we are no longer even an economic superpower, let alone an example to mankind. . . In September 2009, Obama said . . . “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Obama is unclear, however, about what to do when a people or nation does elevate itself over others and tries to dominate them through force. . . Obama has indeed attempted to engage repressive regimes that do not share our “interests” and do not “respect” us. He has shaken hands with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, backed Chavez’s disciple in Honduras against that country’s legal removal of him from power, hounded Israel over the construction of apartment buildings in East Jerusalem in order to curry favor with the Palestinians, canceled the missile defense agreement with Poland and Czech republic as part of his attempt to push the “reset button” with Russia, made several overtures to Cuba, and sent diplomatic officials on six trips to Syria, a country that hosts, supports, and arms terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, assassinated Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and facilitates the transit of insurgents into Iraq—during one period, over 90% of jihadists traveling to Iraq, according to the U. S. military. Syrian autocrat Bashar al Assad has reciprocated Obama’s outreach by hosting a confab in February 2010 with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrllah and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And, of course, Obama has, as he himself put it, “bent over backwards” in his attempts to reach out to Iran. (pg 216 -217)

Obama’s “renewal of diplomacy” has been another much touted and praised dimension of his presidency so far, meeting with approval from our European allies and a Nobel Peace Prize bestowed not for the President’s deeds but for his rhetoric. Europeans and American liberals are pleased with this shift from Bush’s alleged unilateral arrogance back to Jimmy Carter’s multilateral humility, just as Obama had pledged to do when he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination: “But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21^st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease.” In Obama’s inaugural address, this outreach was specifically directed at Muslim nations, many of which provided the foot soldiers of jihad: “to the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and he pledged that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Obama has delivered on this promise, predicating his outreach, as did Jimmy Carter, on the recognition of our own “culpabilities and shortcomings” (pg 220)

Sometime in May 2009, Obama sent a personal letter to Khamenei calling for “co-operation in regional and bilateral relations,” a missive no more successful than Jimmy Carter’s letter to Khomeini during the hostage crisis. In response, the regime initiated a brutal crackdown on the protests against the rigged June 12 presidential election, protests Khamenei attributed to American “agents” and their provocations. Not even Obama’s delay in speaking out against the attacks on protesters mollified the ayatollah. Indeed, during the height of the mullahs’ crack down on the protesters, the State Department welcomed Iranian diplomats to Fourth of July celebration in honor of the freedoms the Iranians were denying to their people. (pg 224)

Given the solicitous timidity of Obama’s appeasing responses to Iran’s serial hostile behavior—arming and training the killers of American troops, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, nurturing terrorist organizations, threatening to destroy our ally Israel, and imprisoning three U. S. citizens on the pretext they are “spies”—it is no wonder that the two deadlines (in September and December 2009) Obama set for Iran to come clean on its nuclear program, and the accompanying empty threats that have attended these deadlines, have been contemptuously ignored. (pg 224)

The Power of Terrorism

. . . as bin Laden puts it, “two separate camps—one of faith, where there is no hypocrisy, and one of infidelity. . . The infidels are full a of doubt, fear, and self-loathing, and so are unwilling not just to die and kill for their beliefs, but even to discomfort the enemy or endure the mendacious , self-interested calumny of other nations. In this fight, the material and economic superiority of the infidel is great, but the spiritual power of the believer is greater: “Do not let your strength and modern arms fool you,” bin Laden has warned Americans, “For they but win a few battles yet lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are greater, and the end result is the most important thing.” Whether this Islamist estimation of America is accurate or a fatal misjudgment—as it briefly appeared to be in the aftermath of 9/11—will become clear in the coming years. (pg 227)

Modern terror attacks derive their power precisely from being unexpected and seemingly random, occurring not during war but in peace—in the case of 9/11, literally coming out of the clear blue sky. Such attacks intrude into our daily lives and the spaces in which we travel and work, puncturing the cocoon of security from violence that we think our wealth and technology and progress have provided. Hence terrorist violence creates a chronic anxiety that, unlike attacks during war, has no imaginable end brought by the victory or surrender that ends conventional wars, and so is even more demoralizing and conducive to appeasing policies. (pg 232)

. . . violence or the threat of violence has been frequently directed against those in the West who “insult” Allah, Islam, or the Prophet . . . The 2004 brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam by a second-generation Moroccan immigrant angered over the film Submission, which criticizes Islam’s subordination of women; the riots, death threats, and at least 139 dead following a Danish newspaper’s publication in 2005 of innocuous cartoons that used depictions of Mohammed not to insult Islam but to defend free speech. The violence that followed Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor criticizing Mohammed for theologizing violence, an estimation confirmed by the subsequent riots, vandalizing of Christian churches, murder of a nun in Somalia, and kidnapping and beheading of a priest in Iraq—these are the more famous recent instances of Muslim violence striking directly at the heart of Western freedom. (pg 234)

In America, Yale University Press in 2009 decided not to reprint the cartoons and other images of Mohammed in a book about the controversy, citing “an appreciable chance of violence occurring if either the cartoons or other depictions of the Prophet Muhammad were printed . . . a few months later the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art pulled from public view its artworks depicting Mohammed. After the Pope’s Regensburg speech, the New York Times opined, “It is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain,” and advised the Pope “to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating the words can also heal.” Whether what the Pope quoted was true or no not didn’t matter to the Times. Rather than defend a central right of Western political freedom against those who would use force to limit it, many in the West instead capitulate to Muslim violence, masking their fear with the therapeutic “sensitivity” and “respect” seldom granted to any other faith. (pg 236)

Supping with the Jihadist Devils

This jihadist indictment of America . . . has helped to forge what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance,” despite the homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and religious obscurantism that should make the jihadists the mortal enemies of liberal and leftists. This alliance, first created inteh1960s by the left’s tactical embrace of the terrorist PLO, quickly manifested itself in the aftermath of 9/11, when leftist commentators engaged in irrational, unfounded, ignorant, irrelevant, and at times bizarre criticism of the United States that in effect rationalize and confirmed al Qaeda’s own justifications for murder. The dean of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School advised us to “think about our own history, what we did in World War II to Japanese citizens by interning them”. . . A journalist at the University of North Carolina teach-in wanted the President to apologize to “all the millions of victims of American imperialism” . . . Another professor . . . opined that the “ultimate cause [of 9/11] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades”. . . The premier practitioner of this species of fantastic complaint is MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who when the war in Afghanistan started accused the U.S. of intentionally starving three to four million Afghans in a “silent genocide”; like Hamas, interpreted the 9/11 attacks as justified payback for American “depredations” against the Third World and American Indians; and while on tour in Islamabad, echoed the Islamist charge that the U.S. is the “world’s biggest terrorist state” and the war in Afghanistan the “worse kind of terrorism.” (pgs 249-250)

Statements such as these reflect the post-Vietnam narrative of American evil and culpability, a self-loathing brew of historical ignorance, juvenile utopianism, specious moral equivalence, and reflexive anti-American condemnation that for over three decades has constituted the received wisdom of liberal intellectuals in the universities and the media. As such, it has been a powerful political and cultural force for appeasement by eroding our will to fight and by undermining our confidence that the fight is just and so worth the cost in blood and treasure. And it confirmed the jihadists’ estimation that we are weak and corrupt, our civilization resting on “foundations of straw.” As bin Laden said . . . “every Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent,” as French social critic Pascal Bruckner puts it. As a result, Bruckner continues, “We Europeans have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must be relentlessly atoned for. This evil is known by two terms—colonialism and imperialism.” (pg 251)

If bin Laden and the Islamists have “hijacked” and “distorted” Islam, where is the mainstream Muslim protest against such a desecration of their faith? “Nowhere in [the Islamic world],” Robert Spencer writes, “is there a significant anti-jihad, anti-al Qaeda, or anti-bin Laden movement; while Muslims worldwide rioted over cartoons in a Danish newspaper and remarks by Pope Benedict XVI, they have never rioted over Osama bin Laden’s supposed hijacking of their faith.” (pg 260)

Sniggering at Patriotism

. . . American appeasement reflects the decline of Patriotism, the loyalty to and affection for one’s country and its beliefs, and the willingness to fight, kill, and die to protect the homeland that has made us what we are. Yet for many American who no longer believe in their country’s goodness, such “patriotic pride is morally dangerous,” as philosopher Martha Nussbaum claims, for we should give allegiance to “the moral community made up of all human beings.” Believing in this non-existent “world community,” such people are quick to attribute all the world’s ills to the freest and most benign global power in all of history. Thus, ever since the Vietnam War we have witnessed American Citizens who benefit from the freedom and prosperity of their homeland actively supporting and encouraging an enemy who is killing their fellow citizens, an enemy who despises all the freedoms and human rights America’s critic enjoy and claim to cherish. Such corrosive attitudes are dangerous . . . Indeed, this disdain of patriotism which Orwell in the 1940s thought was limited to many English intellectuals, has become received wisdom in the United States and is considered a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication even by many outside the intellectual class. (pgs 266-267)

Volunteer Dhimmi

All these appeasing behaviors—born of fear, self-flagellating guilt over presumed historical crimes, multicultural fantasies about non-Western “other,” deprecation of religion and spiritual motives, disdain for America, and delusional ideals about some international “harmony of interests” and the transnational institutions that through diplomatic negotiation can resolve disputes better than force—such behaviors conform to the traditional Islamic notion of the dhimmi, the “subjugated, non-Muslim individuals or people that accept there restrictive and humiliating subordination to the ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death,”. . . [These submissions], to many traditional Muslims, are signs of fear born of spiritual weakness and a lack of confidence in our beliefs as something worth killing and dying for. Rather than signs of our superiority, they are instead interpreted as acknowledgments of Islam’s; superiority. . . (pg 269)

The appeasement of jihad, then, ultimately reflects failure of imagination akin to that of many English writers and leaders in the 1930s, who could not imagine a leader possessing the murderous fanaticism of an Adolf Hitler. This strange sort of ethnocentrism assumes that the whole world believes as we do and desires the same goods and ends. (pg 269)

“So whoever has realized,” bin Laden told Al Jazeera, “that the rewards of this world are few and that the next world is better and more permanent, he is the one who responds to the commands of God almighty” to wage jihad, thereby “showing that this life, this world, is an illusory pleasure.” (pg 269)

In short, as bin Laden and other Islamists continually remind us, because they have this conviction, they love death more than we love life, echoing the words of Khalid ibn al-Walid in 636 [AD] before the battle of Qadisiyya against the Persians: “I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.” For men such as these, negotiation, compromise, tolerance, protestations of respect, promises of democratic freedom, and materialist bribes will have little effect. Only a demonstrated, relentless willingness to take them at their word and give them what they love will end their aggression. (pg 270)

The Hamlet of Nations (Conclusion)

We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of Nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond. A great nation with global responsibilities cannot afford tobe hamstrung by confusion and indecisiveness. George P. Shultz (pg 271)

For all their strengths, democracies are plagued by the pressure of factional or other self-interests on the political decisions made in response to a threat. . . by allowing broad participation in government, gives greater scope to the people’s shortsighted passions and interests at the expense of long-term calculation, and allows impatience with sacrifice and suffering to affect policy. . . The people are more apt to feel than to reason; and if their present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten.” (pgs 271-272)

More broadly, this failure of imagination lies behind an ideal peculiar to modernity, the “moralizing internationalism” predicted on an imagined “harmony of interests,” such that, as John Stuart Mill wrote, “The good of no country can be obtained by any means but such as tend to that of all countries, nor ought to be sought otherwise, even if obtainable.” This view is based on the assumption that all men are for the most part rational and that global civilization is progressing away from violence and irrational aims toward the goods Westerners prize and desire. . . These assumptions lay behind the creation for first the League of Nations and then the United Nations, still the premier global exemplar of these views, despite its serial failures over the last 60 years. And it still informs much of our own foreign policy, which assumes that all peoples are “just like us”, and so they desire the political freedom and material prosperity we prize, and prefer peace to war, deliberation to violence, material goods to spiritual, and getting along with other states to dominating them. (pgs 274-275)

The United nations has become what Churchill feared, a “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” in which those states without the courage of their convictions substitute talk for action and those pursuing their own malignant aims, like the jihadist regime in Iran and its supporters, find the procedural camouflage and global respectability that further their designs. (pg 276)

These weaknesses of democracy, however, are an acceptable trade-off for the many benefits of democratic government. For all its risks of selfish or shortsighted policies, the political freedom that extends participation in government to all the citizens makes the state their “common thing,” as the Greeks put it, their own possession, hence giving them a powerful interest in the state’s flourishing and survival. Moreover, from the plains of Marathon and the waters of Salamis, to the beaches of Normandy and the alleys of Falllujah, this sense of ownership in turn has made the citizen-soldiers of democracies lethal fighters once they have been roused to “a sudden effort of remarkable vigor.” This vital strength of democracy, however, is in turn dependent upon the continuing commitment of the people to the way of life, political ideas, and shared beliefs that bind them into a nation. (pg 276)

Perhaps Pericles, leader of the world’s first democracy, put it best in his funeral oration: Any one can discourse to you forever about the advantages of a brave defense, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes up the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not all their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their live to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. (pg 277)

. . . when that passionate attachment to the state as the citizens’ own possession and expression of their identity is eroded, when the political virtues expressing that attachment—courage, self-sacrifice, duty—are weakened, when the sate is viewed as a mere dispenser of entitlements and the umpire of conflicting centrifugal interests, democracies are vulnerable to the temptations of appeasement and its sacrifice of long-term security for short-term comfort. (pg 277)

Only the West Can Save the World

In 1947, T. S. Eliot recognized the dangers of modernity’s mistaken assumption about religion’s irrelevance: “The Liberal still thinks in terms of political differences which can be settled by negotiation, and of religious differences which have ceased to matter; he assumes further that the cultural conflict is one which can, like political conflict, be adjusted by compromise, or, like religious conflict, be resolved by tolerance. But the culture conflict is a religious conflict on its deepest level: it is one whole pattern of life against another.” (pg 280)

George Weigel writes, “A West that sees in its past nothing but pathology—racism, colonialism, religious wars and persecutions, sexism, and all the rest—is a West that cannot, and almost certainly will not defend its present.” For the United States, the stakes of failure are high not just for us but for the whole world. Like it of not, intended or not, America has assumed the mantle of keeper of global order once possessed by the British [Roman] empire. If prosperity, freedom, and peace are to have a chance of becoming a possibility for the rest of the world rather than remaining the increasingly beleaguered privilege of the West, then the world needs what Niall Ferguson calls a “liberal empire,” for there are “parts of the world were legal and political institutions are in a condition of such collapse or corruption that their inhabitants are effectively cut off from any hope of prosperity. And there are states that, though weakness or malice, encourage terrorists organizations committed to wrecking a liberal world order.” (pg 281)

The United States is the only country that can perform the task of maintaining global order, if only because it is the only state with the military power and reach to do so. But it won’t if America’s traditional fear of “entangling alliances” and what Ferguson calls “imperial denial” are worsened by a collapse in the confidents that the U.S. is indeed worthy of that role and is better than any alternative. (pg 281)

Both the Roman and British empires declined for many reasons, but one they both share is the loss of pride and faith in what it meant to be a Roman or a Briton, and the breakdown in the passionate belief in their own unique national excellence, inspiring them with the confidence that they deserved their empires and justifying the sacrifices of blood and treasure necessary to defend them. (pg 282)