Henninger: American Fatigue Syndrome

[Valin]

WSJ:

If the U.S. doesn't lead, the strongmen win. For them it's easier.

Daniel Henninger

3/19/14

 

By the time the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, the whole world was watching it. We may assume that Vladimir Putin was watching. Mr. Putin, a quick calculator of political realities, would see that someone was going to get hit for this, and hit hard.

 

He was right of course. The Bush presidency became a war presidency that day, and it pounded and pursued the Islamic fundamentalists of al Qaeda without let-up or apology.

 

(Snip)

 

Vladimir Putin re-proves that sometimes a bad person gains control of the instruments of national power. Their populations do nothing or can't, because they are disarmed by thugs with overwhelming firepower. Or, as on Russian TV now, they are marinated in anti-U.S. propaganda. Today even second-rate megalomaniacs gain access to high-tech weaponry, including missiles and nuclear bombs.

 

Running alongside these old realities is a new phenomenon, surely noticed by Mr. Putin: The nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality. Barack Obama says so, as does the International Monetary Fund. Western Europe amid the Ukraine crisis is a case study of nations redistributing themselves and perhaps NATO into impotence.

 

(Snip)

 

[Valin]

The Crimea and The Global Leadership Deficit

Clark S. Judge

3/20/14

 

The March 19th front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal announced, Defiant Russia Claims Crimea as Violence Flares in Region. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, one European country invaded and annexed the territory of another.

 

The unseen subtext of so many similar headlines around the world was that the end may have come to period in which honoring of international borders, democracy and open markets were the advancing global norm. That era began with the Allies victory in 1945 and reached its apotheosis with the collapse of Soviet communism in 1992. The late 80s and early 90s saw the ascendency of democratic, more or less market-honoring regimes from Russia and Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan to much of Latin America. Later even the Middle East was touched. Essential to the freedom wave was the global leadership of the United States.

 

It has been said that the United States is exceptional not because it stands of American values but because it stands for universal values. The question everywhere now is, does this country have the will or strength to stand for anything? Yet in diplomatic circles the question is not new, only the boldness with which Russian president Vladimir Putin answers no, U.S. global leadership is finished. To show how long it has been whispered in international circles, the rest of this column comes from mine posted in this space on September 21, 2009:

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Could it be that out fearless leader want to "Fundamentally Change" not only America but the world?

A good argument could be made that Barack Obama, Patrick J. Buchanan, Ron Paul find much to agree on....that it's time for America to retreat from The world.

We did that after WWI, and that worked out real good, well except for the 60,000,000 + who died, and the vast parts of the world leveled, but why would we be bothered by those minor little details.