“The Essential Nobility of US Foreign Policy”

 
A faceted, brilliant reflection from The American Thinker by James Lewis:

“Now that the Left, in the shape of the Academic Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, has decided that the Nazis were right, and the United States really is controlled by a Jewish cabal, it is useful to remind ourselves of the essential nobility of US foreign policy since Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, and the continuity of this essence.

[…]

There is no decent alternative to America, and America has decided that the small but feisty nation of Israel should be treated as Britain was during the Nazi Blitz: That is, it should be helped to survive, even at a near-term political cost. Because Israel is a democracy – flawed like all real world democracies, to be sure, but still the kind of country with a Supreme Court that tells the government to protect the human rights of captured terrorists at war with the state. Britain, before its present decline, was also small, besieged, and about to go down when America came to its aid.

[…]

The first great expeditionary force of green US troops were sent to North Africa. But Tunisia had not attacked us. The US and Brits invaded Morocco and Tunisia because it provided a strategic salient for driving the Axis powers back, one step at a time.

That’s called strategy… It defeated Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini, even as it defeated the Soviet Empire fifty years later.

The French hated US policy in World War Two. They couldn’t understand it, especially since their impotent fleet was sunk in the process. Stalin hated it, and demanded that the Western Allies send waves upon waves of troops into Europe to sacrifice their lives, as millions of Russian moozhiks were doing in the East.

It was Churchill and Roosevelt who decided on North Africa, just as it was Bush and Blair who saw the strategic logic of moving against Saddam’s Iraq, fully aware of the risks. Iraq is the keystone to the Middle East. Overthrowing Saddam cut down one threat, and simultaneously put the hair-raising Iranian fanatics at a strategic disadvantage.

Israel is not the only reason for the US strategy in the Middle East.

There is the supply of oil, the lifeline of the industrialized world.

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US policy in the Middle East … protects Europe as surely as it protected Britain in World War Two. The US strategic vision is long term, at the cost of short-term pain, sacrifice, and risk. It is an adult vision in a world of loud-mouthed infants.

Oddly enough, a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln said those words, the United States is still ‘the last, best hope of mankind.’”


And since Lincoln's words remain valid, we may as well accept that we will be hated and vilified for our role, our vital and absolutely necessary, noble role.

Our great character flaw is not our open-handed generosity, it is our failure to see that envy is inevitable and that the harder we try, the more we are hated.

Still, we must try; it is part of who we are -- “the last, best hope.” After us, what then?

And in their heart of hearts, the rest of the world knows this. They have known it for a hundred years.