Here's one of the best pieces I've ever seen about the Middle East mess. It's long, but worth reading every word. Because of its length, it's in four parts. Here's Part One.
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PAST THE APOGEE: AMERICA UNDER PRESSURE
by Charles Krauthammer
December 2006
Charles Krauthammer writes an internationally syndicated
column for the Washington Post Writers Group. He is also a
monthly essayist for Time magazine, a contributing editor to
The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a weekly
panelist on Inside Washington. He was awarded the 1987
Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and Financial
Times recently named him America's most influential
commentator. This enote is based on his keynote address at
FPRI's November 14, 2006, annual dinner, at which Dr.
Krauthammer was the second recipient of FPRI's Benjamin
Franklin Award for Public Service. The essay is available on
line at
http://www.fpri.org. PAST THE APOGEE: AMERICA UNDER PRESSURE
by Charles Krauthammer
Keynote Address at FPRI's Annual Dinner
November 14, 2006
We are now in a period of confusion and disorientation,
almost despair. I think it is worthwhile to look back
historically to see how we got to where we are today.
In the mid to late 1980s, the idea of American decline was
in vogue. Japan was rising, China was awakening, Europe was
consolidating, America was said to have been in the midst of
what historian Paul Kennedy called "imperial
overstretch."[1] The conventional wisdom of the time was
that the bipolar world of the United States and the Soviet
Union would yield to a new world structure which would be
multipolar, with power fairly equally divided between Japan,
perhaps China, a diminished Soviet Union, a consolidating
Europe, the United States, and perhaps other rising
countries such as India or perhaps even Brazil. That's how
the world looked in the mid to late 1980s.
When I wrote the article "The Unipolar Moment" (Foreign
Affairs, Winter 1990/91), it achieved some renown because,
remarkably, I was the only one saying at the time, that in
fact, with the end of the Cold War, the United States would
end up as the unipolar power, the dominant, hegemonic power
in the world. There would be none even close to us in
ranking. The old bipolar world would yield not to a
multipolar world but to one with only one great influence,
and that would be us.
In fact, that has occurred. At the time, I was thinking
about how long this might last and called the article "The
Unipolar Moment." I thought it might last a generation.
Twenty to thirty years, I wrote. Here we are almost exactly
15 years later, the midpoint of the more optimistic
estimate.
The first part of the unipolar era since the fall of the
Soviet Union, which can the dated between 11/09 (November 9,
1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 9/11, would be the
period of American ascent, in which our dominance in the
world became absolutely undeniable, to the degree that in
the 1990s, we couldn't quite figure out what to do with all
this preponderance of power. There were some
neoconservatives and others who were proclaiming an era of
American greatness where we ought to exert ourselves
overseas, even in the absence of a threat, simply as a way
of being true to our traditions and values. To some extent,
one might say that our intervention in the Balkan wars,
where we had almost no national interest, was an example of
this assertion of unrivaled power in the interests of our
values.
Others of us thought that in the absence of an enemy, we
ought not be exerting ourselves for the sake of exerting
ourselves. I advocated a policy that I called "dry powder,"
where we would maintain our resources, conserve our
strength, and wait for the inevitable, which would be the
rise of an adversary. In the 1990s, of course, that
adversary was not obvious. He was working in the shadows,
preparing, and finally revealing himself on 9/11. That's
when the structure of the world became blindingly clear. We
were confronted with a new ideological, existential enemy,
meaning an enemy who threatens our existence and very way of
life; who is driven by a messianic faith and is engaged in a
struggle to the death. This was an heir to the ideological
existential struggles of the twentieth century, first
against fascism and then against communism, in which we had
prevailed.
Sept. 11 ushered in the second era of this unipolar era,
which I would call the era of assertion, where the power
that had been latent in America shows itself. I would date
this era from 9/11 to the March 14, 2005, a date probably
unfamiliar to you and not particularly renowned in our
history today, but a date that I think will be remembered by
historians as the apogee of American power, the peak of the
arc of the unipolar era.
