Monday, April 2, 2007

It's Not a New Metaphor

Soft power is the grease that keeps the iron machinery of military and economic power not just running smoothly, but running at all. In an anarchic world, military power must be the heart of national security – and in the post-Cold War world, American military power is the best guarantor of a global balance of power that won’t collapse into a whole new world war. But some minimal level of trust and partnership is absolutely necessary for the United States to remain safe in the world, and it always has been absolutely necessary.

Victor Davis Hanson makes some good points, particularly regarding the illusions that many Europeans indulged in during the first decade of the post-Soviet era. But how do his realist assumptions about human nature square up with his description of a continent of puny Bohemians, and his assertion that the European response to a major terrorist attack would be simply to roll over and play dead? I promise, the Europeans still know how to fight – shouldn’t we be glad that they’ve let us take, virtually unchallenged, the hegemonic steering wheel for awhile?

Andrew Sullivan has a much smarter response than I’m able to come up with:

[T]he collapse in hard power is even steeper. It's the crumpled paper tiger of the US military in Iraq that is fueling Iranian aggression. The grind of the under-manned and under-planned Iraq occupation has destroyed the U.S.'s credible hard power in the Middle East. With this deft, disgusting game with British sailors, Iran's regime is reminding us of two things: that we have no real soft power left among our allies, and that our hard power is being slowly degraded and humiliated in Iraq.

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