Who Weakened America?

Charles Krauthammer has a long piece in the Weekly Standard on American hegemony under President Obama. As you would expect, Krauthammer is very worried about the global hegemony project under President Obama:

This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory--as policy--has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. But that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.

Interestingly, over the span of a very long article, Krauthammer does not touch on the true engine of America's (relative) decline: neoconservatism. The record on this is as clear as it is irrefutable: President Bush enters office with a budget surplus, and leaves with yawning deficits, two open-ended, expensive and strategically ill-advised bouts of nation building, the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea progressing, and much of the world ill-disposed toward the United States. By every measure, American power declined substantially under the stewardship of those predisposed to Krauthammer's arguments. Yet he insists on constructing a rather baroque argument around "New Liberalism's" project to destroy the American Empire.

Krauthammer then asserts:

Because what for Europe is decadence--decline, in both comfort and relative safety--is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink, and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?

This is an extraordinary statement. Consider some of the places the U.S. military has intervened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall: the Balkans, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan.

In most of these cases, the security of the United States wasn't even a remotely relevant factor.

Conflating American security with military interventionism is an old trick, but it doesn't make it any more intellectually defensible. And again, it's worth repeating: when those disposed to Krauthammer's arguments held policy making positions, American power declined precipitously.

(AP Photos)