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I have no difficulty whatever thinking in their terms. But I see no strength in it, only desperation and stupidity.

As for the "we" that you think has little desire to win, I don't see it that way. We have some weak domestic enemies as well as some weak foreign enemies. Their weaknesses are of different kinds, but both are hopelessly weak. Our domestic enemies indeed want to do as little as possible. But that makes them quite unformidable as enemies. All that is necessary to defeat them utterly is to ignore their bleating, since by their own admissions they will never actually get off their asses and do a darn thing to us. The foreign enemies are perfectly willing to get off their asses, but weak in every other respect and readily annihilated.

What neither possesses is the simultaneous willingness to act with such restriction in the aim of that action as calls forth numerous allies and steady will. There is a reason justice is the settled policy of all the greatest political powers in the world. It simply generates gobs more power than desparate spasms of ruthlessness.

There is no power in ruthlessness. It is superstition to look for it there (the violence to conscience involved is experienced as overcoming the enemy, when it has no effect on him whatever). Look at the most ruthless parts of the world, and you find division and squalor. Ruthlessness as a road to power leads to Somalia - starving gangs of hoodlums fighting to the death over the last sack of rice somebody better dropped before leaving. Or the Congo - famously the greatest power of our age (sic) because all sides are willing to eat one another.

Meanwhile, where principle dedication to worthwhile cooperative efforts are the norm instead, you find not absence of will, but Marines, steadfast beyond the dreams of fanaticism, armed with actual honor, covered in glory, surrounded by the buried empires of superstitious ruthlessness they have annihilated - and also armed with the technological marvels the author foolishly slights, which our actual enemies would give their right hands to have a tenth of.