Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
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Posted on 02/24/2005 6:36:45 AM PST by quidnunc
I was of course carrying this to the extreme.
We cannot withdraw from the world and build a cocoon..We can continue to try to develop successful defenses..but as 911 showed us...our problems are not just from a nuclear state.
You can yearn for yesterday but this is the 21st century.
Simplistic.
Ward Churchill, is that you?
But really, militant Islam is something everyone is going to have to deal with sooner or later, no matter how much "staying out of the middle east" you try to do. Any stick will do to beat a dog with, and if that wasn't their greivance something else would be.
Islam is not like Christianity. You can say no the Christianity, Islam does not take no for an answer. I have worked with too many moderate Muslims, and their take on the issue to a man is that if you don't bow the knee to allah, your children will, on pain of death.
Where I part ways with VDH is his incessant liberal nanny carping about the size of my car.
There is no contrast. Islamofascists made it our business on 11 September 2001, even if it wasn't our business earlier.
Did you miss that little event on 9/11/01? Left alone they will just keep upping the ante.
"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11.
When America was a child, globally speaking, isolationism made sense. There was nothing to be gained from involvement in world affairs, and much to be lost. Europe was a cauldron of endless war, and we were wise to minimize our dealings with them. We were safe between our vast oceans, and for centuries we were better off on our own.
Times have changed. We must abandon the happier ways of our youth, and admit that the world our nation was born into has passed into history.
Technology has made isolationism impossible and undesirable. Even if we were to avoid other countries, the gravity of our power and influence affects the world whether we like it or not. Whether we like it or not, they will react to us, because our very existence is corrosive to totalitarian states and repressive ideologies. They must defeat us, because we are a threat to them simply by being here. Rather than be a target, we've often taken the fight to our enemies. But what if we had failed to do so?
If we had withdrawn from the cold war, communism would have conquered the world. Isolationism would have merely meant we would be the last to fall. If we had remained isolationist during WWII, would there have been a Manhattan project? What kind of world would 2005 be if the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese invented the atomic bomb before us? These are not idle questions: we very easily could have run from these 'foreign entanglements' and paid dearly.
The world is full of tyrants, fanatics, and monsters that we can't hide from. We either keep them in check, or they will grow powerful enough to destroy us. It's an unenviable position that Americans don't enjoy (and probably why we're the only ones that can do it). But we have no choice. We can't uninvent things; there's no stuffing these genies back in the bottle. We must carry on, because there can be no turning back. If we don't take our place as top dog, China will. If we don't ram the culture of freedom, rule of law, and tolerance down the throats of the third world, they'll be fed Wahabbi Islam instead. The world is to small to kid ourselves into thinking we'll somehow be spared.
Techonology has changed the world, and made it too small to hide in. This has nothing to do with 'imperialism' or 'dreams of empire' and everything to do with the survival of our nation in it's present form. Nostalgia for simpler times is pleasant, but it is no answer for the challenges of the future.
there are several inaccuracies in your post.
re: the Imperial Japanese and atomic research; islamic infiltration of central and south america; exceptionally narrow presentation of the law of unintended consequences.
A little research is suggested.
From the FAS:
Nuclear Weapons Program
In the fall of 1940, the Japanese army concluded that constructing an atomic bomb was indeed feasible. The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or Rikken, was assigned the project under the direction of Yoshio Nishina. The Japanese Navy was also diligently working to create its own "superbomb" under a project was dubbed F-Go, headed by Bunsaku Arakatsu at the end of World War II. The F-Go program [or No. F, for fission] began at Kyoto in 1942. However, the military commitment wasn't backed with adequate resources, and the Japanese effort to an atomic bomb had made little progress by the end of the war.
Japan's nuclear efforts were disrupted in April 1945 when a B-29 raid damaged Nishina's thermal diffusion separation apparatus. Some reports claim the Japanese subsequently moved their atomic operations Konan [Hungnam, now part of North Korea]. The Japanese may have used this facility at for making small quantities of heavy water. The Japanese plant was captured by Soviet troops at war's end, and some reports claim that the output of the Hungnam plant was collected every other month by Soviet submarines.
There are indications that Japan had a more sizable program than is commonly understood, and that there was close cooperation among the Axis powers, including a secretive exchange of war materiel. The German submarine U-234, which surrendered to US forces in May 1945, was found to be carrying 560 kilograms of Uranium oxide destined for Japan's own atomic program. The oxide contained about 3.5 kilograms of the isotope U-235, which would have been about a fifth of the total U-235 needed to make one bomb. After Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the occupying US Army found five Japanese cyclotrons, which could be used to separate fissionable material from ordinary uranium. The Americans smashed the cyclotrons and dumped them into Tokyo Harbor.
Let me know if you want in or out
My guess would be Pat Buchanan.
>>Technology has made isolationism impossible and undesirable.
Excellent post, perhaps the FR POTD. And that line is the key point.
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