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WSJ Editorial celebrates Sarkozy’s brand of French foreign policy. Not bad results from the moron in the White House.
Nicolas Sarkozy made headlines this week by telling his diplomatic corps that “an Iran with nuclear weapons is for me unacceptable.” But the French President did more in his speech than name the gravest current threat to global security, itself a feat of clear thinking. He also signaled that France means to be something more on the international scene than an anti-American nuisance player.
That’s worth applauding at a time when the conventional wisdom says the next U.S. President will have to burnish America’s supposedly tarnished reputation by making various policy amends. In Germany, under the conservative leadership of Angela Merkel, foreign policy views have been moving closer to the Bush Administration’s, not further away, while new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear he will not depart significantly from the pro-American course set by Tony Blair.
Michael Barone blogs on the unintended consequences of law school affirmative action. Mr. Barone is fair enough to include a ringing defense of the program by Walter Dellinger.
… I’ve long opposed racial preferences not because of the harm they do to those who are discriminated against (a nonblack student who loses a place at Harvard to a lower-scoring black will get admitted to a slightly less selective school and will probably do just fine) but because of the harm they do to the intended beneficiaries (creating a stigma of inferiority, which is just the thing that those of us who have long been against racial discrimination don’t want to see).
But I have to admit that some of these administrators may have worthier motives. I’m prompted to do so by a Slate piece by Walter Dellinger on the Supreme Court’s recent decision barring (or mostly barring) racial discrimination in public school assignment. …
John Stossel writes again about the rankings of the World Health Organization.
… So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.
But there’s less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading.
First let’s acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
Even with all that, it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top. Sick people come to the United States for treatment. When was the last time you heard of someone leaving this country to get medical care? …
The never-ending decline of America is the subject of this tongue-in-cheek article from Real Clear Politics. Never ending to the extent the country has been in decline for more than three hundred years. This is another long item.
… By the mid-eighteenth century, the University of Virginia’s James Ceaser has written, it was widely accepted in Europe that “due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline.” …
… Two generations later, the Civil War would decapitate the national government and deform the nation. As Jay Winik’s April 1865 (HarperCollins, 2001) reminds us, the war not only called into question almost a hundred years of independent self-government, but also embodied decline in its purest sense. Winik recounts savage episodes of murder, mayhem, guerilla warfare, terrorism, vigilantism, and state-sanctioned brutality on a par with anything we condemn today — innocent civilians rounded up and summarily executed; cities burned to the ground; entire counties depopulated; mutilations and beheadings; all manner of torture. After Lincoln’s murder, General Sherman openly feared America’s slipping into anarchy. …
… The U.S. failed to respond to the threats posed by the rise of power-projecting dictatorships in Europe and the Pacific — threats punctuated by Japan’s attack on the USS Panay in December 1937 and numerous German attacks in the Atlantic and the Red Sea. As if to underscore American weakness, President Franklin Roosevelt famously sent word to Hitler in 1938 that “the United States has no political involvements in Europe.” The German dictator got the message. Washington’s diplomatic deference and military meekness, says Gerhard Weinberg in A World At Arms (Cambridge, 1994), confirmed Hitler’s “assessment that this was a weak country, incapable, because of its racial mixture and feeble democratic government, of organizing and maintaining strong military forces.” …
… U.S. political power and prestige suffered yet another blow when Sputnik rocketed into orbit in 1957 and Moscow took the high ground in the space race. Senator Henry Jackson called it “a national week of shame and danger.” Senator Lyndon Johnson warned that “control of space means control of the world.”
Of course, the U.S. faced terrestrial problems as well. “The Soviet Union increasingly appeared to be a triumphal industrial giant,” Leebaert says. The New York Times, he notes, predicted that Soviet industrial output would exceed America’s by the end of the twentieth century, and the CIA surmised that the Soviet economy would be three times larger than America’s by 2000. “The overwhelming question,” Leebaert writes of the 1950s, “was whether an apparently soft, even hedonistic American consumer society had the stamina for a long, inconclusive contest with communism.” …
… To be sure, the U.S. faces challenges, competitors and threats that could erode its global position: China and India are ascending economically; the world abounds with asymmetrical threats that have the capacity to undermine the liberal order that Washington has sought to spread for generations; and Americans find themselves in the midst of yet another “great ideological conflict,” in the words of the president’s most recent security strategy document.
Today as in the past, U.S. primacy is neither inevitable nor a birthright. It is a burden that must be justified and shouldered anew by each generation in its own way. Even so, and notwithstanding Iraq, this is an unusual moment to diagnose the United States as a nation in decline. Just as the past is littered with unfulfilled predictions by the declinists, the present is teeming with evidence of unprecedented U.S. power.
From peace-keeping to war-fighting, deterrence to disaster relief, it is the U.S. military that the world turns to when in need. Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami has noted, “The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip and its hipness.”12 Especially its protection: More than half the globe enjoys overt defense and security treaties with the United States. The U.S. military is the last (and first) line of defense for most of the rest.
Of course, the U.S. military does more than protect and defend: In the span of about 23 months, it overthrew two enemy regimes located on the other side of the planet and replaced them with popularly supported governments. Even as American forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, they kept watch on the Korean peninsula and kept the sea-lanes open for the oil and goods that feed a truly global economy; did the dirty work of counterterrorism from Tora Bora to Timbuktu; and responded to disasters of biblical proportion in places as disparate as Louisiana and Sumatra.
This does not seem to be the handiwork of a faltering empire. Indeed, no other military could attempt such a feat of global multitasking. “The British empire,” writes Niall Ferguson in Colossus (Allen Lane, 2004), “never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition . . . [and] never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today.” …
Dilbert blogs on the Chinese coal miners who survived underground for six days. If this catches you in the right mood, you will laugh until it hurts.