The Old World is Gone

The American Prowler has a very good column here titled "We Used to Have a Deal," By Lawrence Henry. It is very much worth your time reading the whole thing, but these exerpts are the high points:

The United States used to have a deal with the world. We would buy things from other countries, confidently assuming that those countries would sell them to us. We would also sell things to other countries, confidently assuming that they would want to buy them. And if some of those countries had a problem or two (dictators, human rights violations, oppressed peasants, etc.), as long as they kept those problems pretty much to themselves, we would leave them pretty much alone.

That deal has historical antecedents. Unlike the colonialist conquerors of Europe, we stayed secure behind our twin oceans, which made a commercial approach to the world appealing to us. And it suited our natures as a people. On our own continent, the two biggest single expansions -- Thomas Jefferson's $15 million Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and Secretary of State William H. Seward's 1867 buy of Alaska for $7,000,000 -- were deals. Of course, America did things wrong in pursuit of that policy. The words "banana republic" come to mind.

But, all in all, it proved a pretty peaceful, if some would say cynical, way to behave.

And

With the attacks of 9/11, it became clear that a monstrously hostile entity -- radical Islamic terror -- existed in the world, and that their very reason for hostility was the deal itself. And they were determined to break us before the deal broke militant Islam entirely. The Golden Arches and Britney Spears videos were mortally dangerous to them. It became clear as well that all terrorists and all nations that encouraged and harbored them -- and virtually all Middle Eastern nations did so in some fashion or other, being too weak to fight America any other way -- were one and the same.

So when President George W. Bush decided, after 9/11, that the deal was off, he hurt those parties. He hurt them badly. He broke their rice bowls, to use a phrase from the brokerage industry. And when you break somebody's rice bowl, that somebody gets mad.

George W. Bush had a historic insight: Everything has changed. And he is acting on it, as more than one commentator has remarked. Terry McAuliffe? Jacques Chirac? Gerhard Schroeder? The seven -- or is it nine? -- Democratic would-be Presidential candidates? The Eastern establishment press? The academy? It's no wonder they're mad. Their world is gone.

Say that again, and hear it clearly. The old world is gone.

This is as good a one stop summary of why we are in Iraq for the long haul as you are going to find.

And "the Deal?" Another name for it is American Hamiltonian Grand Strategy.

America's post WW2 long term Grand Strategy was to assimilate the world through trade and popular culture. Free trade was to bind nations together and prevent nations built on economic autarky like Nazi Germany from disrupting the world order. Popular culture was to spread the meme of American freedom and prosperity, so tyrannies could not hold out against their people's demand for the good life.

Thus ended the Soviet Union.

In this our Grand Strategy has worked, and in this it has failed because we let our vigilance falter with the Arab-Muslim world. 9/11/2001 means we must take a more direct and shorter-term approach because our ocean barriers can no longer shield us from insane men that want to kill us in our businesses and homes.