America is Not Perfect, but America is Not an Empire

I thought this article by Zbigniew Mazaruk at American Thinker entitled "America is Not an Empire" was worth quoting extensively:

Isolationists and empire myth propagators also ignore the fact that the Bush administration reduced the number of America's bases abroad by 35% and brought back 70,000 American troopers (including 40,000 military servicemembers stationed in Europe) plus 100,000 civilians from foreign countries to the CONUS.

Well, what about all those land that the US has supposedly conquered during the last several decades? The answer is that, as General Powell has correctly said, during its history, America has conquered just enough land to bury its war dead. The only "provinces" of the "American empire" are large war cemeteries in countries like France, bases where American troops protecting endangered countries are stationed, and a number of small islands acquired by the U.S. during the 1890s (Hawaii, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, etc.), which have since then become territories of the U.S. (Hawaii is now a state.)

General Powell once told a former Archbishop of Canterbury the following:

I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.

During the 20^th century, Americans came to liberate Europe twice, during world wars started by Europeans. Half a million Americans died during those wars. During and after WW2, the U.S. provided huge aid programs to Europe (the Lend-Lease program and the Marshall Plan), with the U.K. being the only country to repay anything.

After WW2, a new threat to Europe emerged: a totalitarian, aggressive, imperialist Soviet Union. The U.S. shielded Western Europe, as well as many other countries, from the Soviet military. It saved South Korea from Kim Il-sung and continues to protect the ROK from the genocidal Pyongyang regime.

The U.S. has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban and Iraq from Saddam Hussein, a dictator who murdered a million of his own people. It has also helped dozens of nations stricken by economic crises or natural disasters, including the Indonesians, the Pakistanis, the Russians, the Mexicans, and the South Koreans.

The U.S. is the country which ended the genocide in the Balkans -- genocide about which Europe was utterly unable to do anything.

Clearly, the world has never had a more benign hegemon than the U.S.

And where is the American empire? In those bases in countries whose governments have asked (and continue to ask) the U.S. to dispatch troops to their soil to defend them from their enemies? (Admittedly, this reduces the burden on these countries and allows some of them to evade their responsibilities, but nonetheless, American troops are defending, not occupying, these countries.)

As for Iraq and Afghanistan -- Obama has announced timetables for withdrawal of American troops from these countries, so they are hardly provinces of an American empire.

The U.S. has not conquered any part of Iraqi, Afghan, German, or Japanese territory. It has never imposed its political system on any other country. It is the only military hegemon which has never used its military might to impose its own political system nor its diktats on other countries, nor to conquer foreign countries and subjugate foreign nations (although the early 19^th-century War Hawks dreamed of conquering Canada).

The "American empire" is a myth. It doesn't exist, and it never did. The only people spreading the myth are implacable ideological opponents of a strong defense like Ron Paul and his cohorts of fans. For them, every American military installation abroad and every war against a foreign country is proof of an empire.

Read it all here.

Sure, America has its flaws and it has done unjust things, particularly in the 18-19th century to native Americans. But one cannot compare the American presence in the world to, say the Soviet Empire of the mid-20th century. That really was an empire and the difference is not pedantic or one of semantics only, it is a moral and substantial difference. If all Great Powers were were as benign as America, even granting America's imperfections, the world would be a much better place.

The Screw Turns: Maybe the "American Empire" Wasn't So Bad After All

Niles Gardner, writing in his Daily Telegraph blog this morning expresses the second thoughts many Europeans are having over the fact that their wish has come true and the White House is now occupied by someone who does not believe in American Exceptionalism or an active role for American power worldwide. All those anti-American, European Leftists, cowering in safety under the US nuclear shield, who decried "Globalization," "American hegemony" and "the American Empire" have had their wish come true.

As 2010 draws to a close, the United States faces a world that is ever more dangerous, with the looming spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran in the Middle East, a resurgent and increasingly aggressive Russia in Europe, a rising totalitarian power in the East in the form of China, a malevolent rogue state in North Korea, and the global threat of Islamist terrorism. Yet Washington seems almost passive in the face of these huge challenges, with an administration whose focus is overwhelmingly upon domestic politics, and lacking any coherent long-term vision in maintaining America’s place as the world’s superpower.

Last week The Times of London summed up the fears of many US allies in an editorial on the passing of veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, when it lamented America’s lack of leadership in the face of its competitors:

America today is arguably less convinced in its moral mission than at any time in the past century. This unease spreads to its natural allies worldwide. As global power shifts, and other growing economic powers learn to flex their might, the West appears increasingly uncertain in its occasional role as the world’s policeman.

The Times makes a strong point. With Ronald Reagan you knew clearly where America stood, and it what it stood for, with the key goal of building up America’s military might, and defeating the Soviet Empire. More recently under George W. Bush, the presidency had a twin strategy in foreign policy of advancing liberty across the world, while waging war against al-Qaeda and its backers.

With Barack Obama there appears to be no great moral cause which drives his foreign policy, no overarching strategy for enhancing American global power, no concept of a global war against Islamist militants, and no desire to strengthen America’s defences. In fact Obama’s approach to international affairs is the exact opposite of Reagan’s. It is based upon a naïve belief that America’s enemies can be won over through “engagement” rather than confronted with maximum strength . . .

Unlike Reagan, Obama does not even believe in American exceptionalism, and is not driven by a sense of American greatness and destiny as the leader of the free world. Nor does he appreciate the importance of preserving and building America’s alliances. For President Obama, the Anglo-American Special Relationship is an irritation rather than a centerpiece of Western leadership in the world. The Obama administration’s betrayal of America’s closest friend over the Falklands is something Reagan would have greatly deplored.

All that remains is for Obama to withdraw all US troops from Europe and dissolve NATO. Then the Europeans can see if it is possible to borrow enough on the bond market to fund the creation of a military strong enough to defend it from invaders from the East and Middle East. A nuclear Russia will want to assert itself in Eastern Europe again and a nuclear Iran will want to impose Islam on Europe at an even faster rate and we will see if Europe has the ability to maintain its cushy welfare state and defend its sovereignty at that same time.

Meanwhile, the US can retreat into isolationism as if it were the 19th century again and create "Fortress North America." Left-wingers can rejoice that now there is no one to prevent North Korea from conquering South Korea or prevent Israel from being destroyed by Muslims. China can assert its power over Africa, Indonesia can be radicalized and persecute Christians. Chavez can make Bolivia into a Stalinist hell-hole. Every tin-pot dictator in the world can become a nuclear power. And the list goes on.

What a great Utopian vision! What wonderful freedom and peace and justice will undoubtedly ensue once the Great Satan retreats into its fortress like Saruman holed up in a flooded Isengard. What great foolishness paraded as wisdom!

The New Conservative Reality in America

Nile Gardiner has a very good piece on his Daily Telegraph blog today on "The decline and fall of Barack Obama: five key factors that drove the midterm election." Here is a snippet and below are the five key factors.

Last week’s midterm elections were without doubt a stunning political revolution, which will transform the political landscape in Washington in the second decade of the 21st Century, and possibly for the next generation.

The Republicans increased their seats in the House of Representatives by the biggest margin since 1948, with a significantly bigger win than 1994, gaining 61 seats. They surely would have taken the Senate as well, had all of the seats been up for re-election, instead of just 37. At the gubernatorial level the GOP now controls 29 governorships compared to just 19 for the Democrats. Republicans also picked up 680 seats in state legislatures, the highest figure in the modern era according to figures provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The midterms were largely a referendum on Barack Obama’s policies and his leadership, and represented a remarkable reversal of fortune for a president who just 21 months ago seemed unassailable.

Here are the five factors he mentions as responsible for this stunning turn-around:

1. America is a conservative nation
2. US voters are unwilling to accept the idea of American decline
3. The Tea Party sparked a political revolution
4. The liberal elites dramatically lost influence
5. The Obama presidency has behaved in an imperial fashion

Gardiner mentions this Gallup Poll, which shows conservatives outnumbering liberals in America today by a factor of 2.5 to 1. That is right, 48% self-identified as conservative, 32% as moderate and only 20% as liberal. That 48% figure for conservatives is up from 40% in 1994 and 42% in 2006. It is a long-term trend.

Victorino Matus at The Weekly Standard explains that the Democrat loss is worse than it appears. Redistricting due to populations changes is coming in the wake of the 2010 Census. He quotes Charles Lane of the Washington Post as follows:

Since the U.S. population continues to flow South and West, reapportionment will probably add House seats in red states and subtract them in blue states. Thus, the Census looks like a setback for Democratic chances to win the 270 electoral votes necessary to become president.

Texas, which has voted Republican in 9 of the last 10 elections will gain 4 electoral votes, according to projections from preliminary Census data by Polidata.com. The other gainers—one vote each—include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah. All of these states have voted for the GOP candidate in at least 7 of the last 10 elections.... Meanwhile, eight states that usually go blue in presidential elections—Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota—are projected to lose one electoral vote each.

Or in other words,

Take the 22 states that voted for John McCain as the GOP base in the 2012 presidential election. That base is about to grow from 173 electoral votes to 180. And if Republicans hold it, they could get to 271 by carrying just six more states—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia and Nevada—each of which has voted GOP in a majority of the last ten elections.

A permanent conservative governing majority for conservatives looms on the immediate horizon. The only question is whether the Republican Party will be its vehicle or not. If the Republican Party was smart, its 2012 presidential ticket would come from the six states mentioned above - say Indiana and Florida.

Historians will look back on Obama's administration as a desperate, last-gasp attempt to resurrect the old failed policies of the New Deal and as writing the obituary for the century long American progressive movement's attempt to turn America into a social democracy. The momentum is now in the other direction: toward a revival of constitutionalism, a renewed commitment to American exceptionalism, a revival of the family, and principles such as limited government and free enterprise.

Why the Tea Party Gives Hope to a Brit and a Canadian

Here is a great post from James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph. Here is a Brit whose feelings I resonate with as a Canadian. The United States of America is not just a country; it is the embodiment of the best of Western political ideals and the home of liberty.

As Daniel Hannan, another conservative Brit, would be quick to point out: the American Revolution was a conservative revolution in favor of ideals of English freedom which were under attack by an out of touch elite. America represents the hope we all have for Western civilization and it is no wonder that the enemies of the West hate Israel and America above all.

Delingpole writes in his post "Only the Tea Party Can Save Us Now":

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt – as you do on returning to Britain these days – as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously – otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years – and not just in the US but throughout the Western world – government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.

What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this.

Delingpole laments the degradation of the once proud British Conservative Party into a party that merely advocates socialist decline more gradually.

Rarely have I felt more despondent about the world’s future than I do right now, Britain’s especially. At least when Blair and Brown were in charge, busily ruining things, there was always the consolation that soon would come the backlash which would see a decent, small-state, conservative administration regaining power and the country’s fortunes restored. This hasn’t happened. The similarities between the Eton Grocer’s Coalition and the New Labour government he ousted are far greater than the differences. All are run by a professional political mandarin class in the interests of the professional political mandarin class.

This is not a man who loves a foreign country more than his own; it is a man who sees the best ideals of his own country no longer characterizing his own country but being preserved elsewhere. He concludes:

Sure there’s no comparison (well not that much) between Obama’s US and Stalin’s Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao’s China; Julia Gillard’s Australia and Queen Ranavalona’s Madagascar; sure the war we’re currently fighting doesn’t involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it’s precisely because the ideological struggle we’re currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady “engrenage” – ratcheting – of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives – not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama’s even under notionally “Centre right” ones such as Cameron’s or Sarkozy’s. When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it’s much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.

That’s why today I say: “Thank God for the Tea Party!” Though it has been typically misrepresented by the liberal media as a rattlers’ nest of gun-toting fruitcakes who want to ban masturbation and abortion, it is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is – whatever the increasingly redundant Moonbat may claim – a genuine grass roots movement inspired by the one great political cause truly worth fighting and dying for: the cause of liberty.

Our ancestors fought and died to preserve Western freedom against the hard totalitarianism of the fascist and communist regimes of the mid twentieth century. But now we, their decadent children, are in mortal danger of surrendering to the soft totalitarianism of the nanny state. But this is to narrowly avoid Animal Farm only to fall into Brave New World.

To my American friends I would say this on election night: you won't realize what riches you had until you suddenly realize they are gone. Don't trade liberty for security; it is not a good deal.

The "The Ruling Class" and Israel

I've been reading and discussing Prof. Angelo M. Codevilla's scintillating essay "America's Ruling Class - and the Perils of Revolution," which was recently published in the American Spectator. Codevilla is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University and his essay can only be described as "class treason."

Caroline Glick, the highly perceptive conservative columnist for the Jerusalem Post, has some thoughts too:

The main unifying characteristic of the American "ruling class" as Codevilla describes it is inexhaustible contempt for the majority of their countrymen who are not part of their clique. In his words, "our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislikes that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way."

Codevilla's article focuses on US domestic policy. He accuses the ruling class of purposely spending the US into insolvency. He claims that their goal is to aggregate power. The more Americans depend on governmental largesse for their livelihoods, the greater the power of the government to dictate norms of social and political behavior and the greater the governing class's hold on power.

Codevilla claims that the Republicans are the permanent minority in the ruling class which is naturally aligned with the Democrats. When they are in power, the Republicans, he claims repress populist and conservative voices within their ranks calling for small government and do so to maintain their good relations with their colleagues in Democratic ruling circles. His prime example of a ruling class Republican is the first president George Bush.

Although Codevilla focuses on domestic issues, Glick is interested in the implications of his essay for international affairs:

There is a clear foreign policy corollary to Codevilla's discussion. Just as US bureaucrats, journalists, politicians and domestic policy wonks tend to combine forces to perpetuate and expand the sclerotic and increasingly bankrupt welfare state, so their foreign policy counterparts tend to collaborate to perpetuate failed foreign policy paradigms that have become writs of faith for American and Western elites.

A prime example of this is US Middle East policy. Regardless of its repeated failure over the course of four decades, since 1970, and with ever-increasing urgency since 1988, the consensus view of the US foreign policy elite has been that Israel's size is the cause of violence and instability in the Middle East. If Israel would just contract into the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, everything would be wonderful. The so-called "extremists" in the Arab and Islamic worlds will become moderates. Iran, Syria, the Saudis, the Palestinians, al Qaida, Hizbullah and the rest would abandon terror and beat their suicide belts and ballistic missiles into ploughshares.

An outstanding example of this sort of cross-partisan nonsense was the 2006 bipartisan Iraq Study Group's recommendations to then president George W. Bush. The war in Iraq was going nowhere and the considered view of esteemed Republican and Democratic policy hands was to stick it to Israel.

In the considered view of these wise men, for the US to emerge from Iraq with honor, it didn't actually have to defeat its enemies. Instead, according to Republicans like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and Democrats like Lee Hamilton and Zbigniew Brzezinski all Bush needed to do was force Israel to cough up the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. Then al Qaida in Iraq, the Shiite militias and all the rest would shrivel up or - at a minimum - allow the US to withdraw its military forces from the country without being humiliated.

It does seem that liberals really believe that if only Israel retreated to its indefensible 1949 borders with no one to prevent Hezbollah and Hamas from wheeling Iranian missiles right up to its borders, then there would be peace.

Do they really believe that? This is what I find hard to believe: that anyone really believes that such a unilateral Israeli retreat would lead to peace rather than simply tempting Israel's enemies from destroying the Jewish state. Finding myself unable to believe that even the most uninformed and mentally slow person could believe that the path to peace is unilateral Israeli surrender of the occupied territories - like the Gaza pull-out on a larger scale - I am forced to conclude that the liberals demanding such behavior from Israel do not want peace at all. What they really want the end of Israel as a Jewish state. They want peace only in the sense that the Communists wanted peace - after the conquest of the world by Communist ideology and the Communist Party.

Liberals who criticize Israel's arms blockade of Gaza should understand that when they blame Israel for the lack of peace and demand unilateral concessions by Israel alone, they do not look like peace activists, but rather like stooges of fanatical, evil terrorists. They should not be upset to be called anti-Jewish racists and fellow-travelers of fascists. They should realize that they have no one but themselves to blame for being perceived that way. Nobody believes the line they are peddling. They might as well be still defending the government of Joseph Stalin as "misunderstood."

If they want to surrender to Islamic terrorism in the Holy Land and in New York and in London, they must expect only scorn, ridicule and denunciations from those who love their own country, their own civilization, and their free way of life. There is no use calling conservatives names as if the conservatives were the problem. The problem here is the loss of credibility of the Western Ruling Class.

Happy 4th of July to My US Friends!

I know its after midnight in Ontario where I live, but I'm in Alberta where it is actually still July 4th and I have not had time for blogging today. The grandparenting work is engrossing and fulfilling. My grandson Isaac does not stand still for long and we have been busy today.

But I want to say to American readers of this blog that I congratulate you on your wonderful country and your great heritage of Christian culture. You have the right to celebrate despite the darkness emanating from Washington DC these days. November 10 is coming.

I have a faculty friend who delights in bashing the idea of American exceptionalism, as is the custom in academia. Let me give you my take on American exceptionalism: for me, American exceptionalism consists very simply in the refusal of the socialist temptation. Americans have said no to socialism, though they have had a welfare state forced upon them by an unelected Supreme Court and a cowardly Congress. But in America one can still breath the air of freedom and the individual is still not the slave of the bureaucratic masters.

You can tell that all is not yet lost by the venomous hatred the socialists have for America. They know an enemy still exists which has not come into their claws and it galls them. At a moment when Russia lies in ruins, China is on the brink of demographic disaster, and Europe is drifting toward totalitarianism, America still fights back against collectivization, slavery and the destruction of the human spirit.

Fight on, happy warriors. You give the rest of us hope in this world, who otherwise would only be able to hope for the next world. The socialists, anarchists, nihilists and lovers of death can be defeated by faith in God and belief in man as a creature created not for slavery but for friendship with God.

The Welfare State and the Pax Americana

In January, I predicted that by the end of this year the idea of a European-style Value Added Tax would be under discussion by the Obama administration. Well, here is a story by Niles Gardner in which the beginnings of that debate may be discerned.

The relentless drive by the Obama administration to undercut economic freedom in the United States continued yesterday with Paul Volcker’s call for the possible introduction of European-style value-added taxes as well as energy or carbon taxes. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chief, is currently the most powerful economic adviser to the president after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and sits as the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

This is not empty, throw away rhetoric, but a call to arms by an aggressively interventionist and uncompromisingly left-wing US administration that is actively seeking to refashion the United States in the image of the European Union, both in terms of foreign and economic policies.

Volcker made the remarks at the New York Historical Society, and his comments were picked up here by Reuters:

In addition to regulatory reform, Volcker said lawmakers would likely have to make some tough choices in the coming years to bring U.S. deficits under control and prevent inflationary pressure from building.

While highly unpopular, he said the United States should consider raising taxes and consider introducing a European-style value-added tax and perhaps an energy or carbon tax.

The value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past, he said, adding it may be necessary to fund entitlement costs and decrease U.S. deficits.

“If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

By building up staggering levels of debt – projected to rise by $12 trillion over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office – through a massive expansion of government spending, including universal health care, the Obama administration is digging itself into a massive hole with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Read the rest here.

We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the "pax Americana," which has lasted from the end of World War II until now. After the war American took over from the exhausted British Empire the task of policing the world and ensuring opportunities for trade and travel. The containment and eventual defeat of Communism was an integral element in this endeavor.

The creation of a European-style social democracy in the US is Obama's goal, but it is incompatible with the levels of military spending required to maintain the pax Americana. Europe (and Canada) can only have the social welfare state it has only because of low military spending and even then it looks like the EU may be entering a period of reckoning for overspending as the default crisis in Greece threatens to spread.

Only because America has been keeping Europe safe has Europe been able to direct so much government spending to entitlement programs for the middle class, as well as the poor. The smug sense of moral superiority many Europeans have toward the US is pretty disgusting. Once Iranian nuclear missiles with a range that enables them to reach Europe are trained on them, and the implications of Obama's reversion to pre-World War I style isolationism sinks in, the more perceptive among them may well end up pining for the good old days when "Cowboy George" paid the freight for their hedonistic lifestyle.

Obama's agenda must be derailed in November for the good of the whole world. Fortunately, the prospects for the Republicans taking control of the House and making strong gains in the Senate continue to be good.

America and Europe

The only people who think America is just like Europe are those who resolutely live their entire lives within the bubble of liberal coastal elites which constitute a small (maybe 20%) and shrinking portion of the US population. It is true that the decadent Hollywood elite, big-city Easterners and tenured radicals in the universities still believe believe that America is predestined to embrace the secular, materialistic, socialistic worldview of Europe. But a strong majority of Americans did not get the memo or, if they did, chose to ignore it.

It isn't just Mississippi; it is Massachusetts where they elected a Republican who ran on a platform of opposition to the massive health care reform bill currently before Congress to the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. This is bad news for the European elites who gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for sounding just like them: America is still a center-right country and is getting more so the longer Barack Obama is president.

Europe, on the other hand, is caught in the culture of death and is committing demographic suicide. Everywhere you look there is a willingness to prostrate oneself before radical Islam, as the show trial of Geert Wilders for "hate speech" against Muslims illustrates.

America is not perfect, but it is not Europe. Mark Steyn, in his colorful style, points out the point of greatest difference between Europe and America during the recent financial crisis:

"I’ve been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament demanding to know why government didn’t do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons."

There is no doubt that the spirit of self-reliance, religious faith, local community resourcefulness and limited government lives on in America in spite of everything. Victor Davis Hanson points out the irony that European prosperity for the whole period since WW II has been built on reliance on American military protection against Communism.

"After the September 2008 American financial panic, European diplomats and intellectuals lectured Americans on the evils of unfettered capitalism and the superiority of their statist model. The strong euro and steady expansion of the EU had convinced many that their soft socialism was the only way of the future.

But European prosperity was, in fact, heavily subsidized by decades of free protection by the U.S. military. Meanwhile, aristocratic bureaucrats in Brussels were increasingly not accountable to their skeptical continental constituents — and seemed terrified of popular referenda from member states on the EU constitution.

And now? Several EU nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal face financial implosions — brought on by unsustainable government spending, out-of-control pensions, and endemic tax cheating. The euro is falling fast. Bondholders of European debt are jittery. Now, northwestern countries like Germany and France — despite their own budget problems — may have to bail out Greece."

Bashing capitalism and feeling smug about statism has been a trademark of European elite opinion. Obama got the Nobel because he validated, in his person as an African-American and in his liberal policies, this European smugness.

But now, instead of asking "Will America inevitably become more like Europe?" some people are beginning to ask "What would it take for Europe to become more like America?" Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, asks: "Why is there no British Tea Party?"

George Weigel, in a recent speech in Paris, gave his opinion on the question of what it would take for Europe to reverse its cultural decline.

"Pointing to the “demographic winter” gripping much of the continent, Weigel described it as a portent of the future, unless Europeans insist on the place of Christian values in society and combat relativism with truth. . .

The first step in the process of Christian renewal, the Catholic author said, is that “intolerance in the name of 'tolerance' must be named for what it is and publicly condemned.” According to Weigel, Biblical morality is being treated in European culture with “bigotry and intolerance” and this is an “uncivil act that must be named as such.” But the prime example of this intolerance is the European Union and individual states believing that they have the authority to redefine marriage – a human institution that “antedates the state ontologically as well as historically,” he said.

Secondly, Weigel argued that Catholic Christians must speak openly “about the empirically demonstrable and deplorable effects of the sexual revolution on individuals and society.” In addition to this, he argued that Catholics need to bring about a “new appreciation of the dignity and nobility of human love” as illustrated in John Paul II's “Theology of the Body.”. . .

The American intellectual also asserted that the Church needs to be vindicated from the “black legends” that circulate around its history, such as the Crusades, Galileo's trial and the Inquisition.

“I raise these matters of historical record, not to score debating points,” Weigel clarified, “but to suggest that part of the challenge we face today is to recognize, with John Paul II and Cardinal Lustiger, that Europe (and indeed the entire West) is suffering from a false story about itself, and about the relationship of biblical religion to its formation and its history.”

Finally, Weigel advised, the Church must continue to develop a “rich interior life,” and at the same time, find “winsome ways to make the Church's proposal to a post-Christian Europe.” One way to do this, he suggested, is for members of the Church to join with men and women “of conscience,” who may not be believers, to publicly challenge “the ever-more-ominous dictatorship of relativism.”

Weigel is here giving expression to the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, who believes that the Church can be a catalyst for cultural renewal in Europe. Why not? It would not be the first time it has happened. And in the process, Europe will become more like America. Ironically, however, it won't become more like the part of America that is now "Europeanized," but rather, more like Middle America, Christian America, Tea Party America.

It is that or death and while we know that many, confronted with that choice, would willingly choose death, there may be a creative minority that would rather live like conservative Americans than under radical Islamic rule.

Imagine America After the Dreams of the Left Have All Come True

• Imagine an America with its military budget reduced by 95%.
• Imagine an America with no Republican Party, but instead with another mainstream party slightly to the left of the Democratic Party and with a socialist third party that regularly gets 20% of the popular vote.
• Imagine an America with a government health care plan for everyone.
• Imagine an America with no National Rifle Association, no National Religious Broadcasters Association and no Southern Baptist Convention.
• Imagine an America with very little Christian TV and radio and only a tiny handful of Christian colleges and universities, all of which are poorly funded and/or unaccredited.
• Imagine an America with legalized same-sex marriage and no privileging of heterosexual marriage in any way.
• Imagine an America with abortion on demand fully paid for by the government available in every hospital.

Does this sound to you like the dreams of Sojourners, the Episcopal Church and other left-wing religious lobby groups all come true? Their rhetoric insists that these changes would make America more just, more humane and more biblical. They speak of these changes in hushed tones as "too good to be true" and sadly unlikely to come to pass because of the Religious Right, the Pope and other such obstacles to Progress.

Does this sound like Canada? Actually, it is an accurate description of Canada. I live in Canada, which is to say that I live in what the US left thinks of as the Kingdom of God. But I have no illusions about this being the Kingdom of God, just as the citizens of Moscow knew that the USSR was not the socialist utopia beloved in the imaginations of Western leftist intellectuals. I know that Canada is a lonely, materialistic and cynical society. We still have poverty. We still have injustice. We still have a population that knows not God. Material deprivation with religious faith is a much more human way to live that material abundance with no religous faith; Western leftist intellecutuals simply do not understand this basic fact of life; it they did they would care about things they don't care about now.

Be careful what you wish for America; you just might get it.

My problem with left-wing Christians is not that they are too ambitious and have plans that are too big. It is that their vision is too small and too obviously derived from the empty liberal individualism of the non-Christian society around them. It is not biblical enough, not humanist enough, not radical enough and, frankly, not worth getting worked up over, i.e. not that important.

The United States of America is a diverse, dynamic and lively country, which is sinking into the culture of death but is not quite there yet. It is the last place in the Western world where a significant minority of Christians still oppose abortion, the sexual revolution and other deadly manifestations of consumerism. The dreams of the Left, if acheived, will only take America down into the degradations of the culture of death. America today is like Gondor, still holding out but weak in her leadership and judged to be ripe for conquest. America after the dreams of the Left have come true will be what Gondor would have been had the quest to destroy the ring failed.