.

      Since the original publication of this book in May 2013, the inattention to the American strategic interest that has afflicted the country quite consistently for most of the more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War has become more evident. Concern for that strategic interest was vital to the unprecedentedly swift rise of America from colonial status to clear preeminence in a bipolar world in just 170 years, and to the status of the world’s only superpower at the end of the Cold War 45 years after that. Thus the degeneration into civil war in Syria led to President Obama declining to take any role at all other than advising that the incumbent president of Syria had to go but doing nothing to achieve that end, then declaring the use of sarin gas by the regime on Syria’s civilian population to be the crossing of a red line that required military retaliation and positioning the naval forces to do that (with cruise missiles), then abdicating the role of commander-in-chief to the Congress, sending his secretary of state to tell congressional leaders that such punitive action would be “unbelievably small,” and, as congressional defeat loomed, dumping the issue into the eager and untrustworthy hands of the Russian gangster-president Vladimir Putin.

      Having reversed the George W. Bush policy of promoting democracy even where this led to the elevation of very undemocratic movements, as in Lebanon and Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank, the Obama administration then abandoned America’s long-time Egyptian ally, the authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, when he came under general pressure. When the anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood was elected to lead the government and set out to rewrite the new constitution unilaterally, somewhat in the manner of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early seventies, and then a military regime seized power in reaction, the administration remonstrated ineffectually and implausibly with the new regime in favor of the Brotherhood and its ousted and no longer overly popular leaders. The administration continued to provide Pakistan with aid that it knew was being sent on to a Taliban faction in Afghanistan that was diligently murdering American and allied soldiers. As this is written, it is not clear that anything will have been accomplished by the sanctions placed on Iran, consistently less severe than those voted by the Congress, to frustrate that country’s quest for a nuclear military capacity. The danger of that country becoming a nuclear power—followed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—is a very disturbing one, and America’s failure of leadership is largely responsible for the concern.

      Truckling to the Palestinians over settlements, a red herring considering that Israel proved in Sinai and Gaza that it would uproot its settlers in compliance with a real peace and not just another land-for-peace scam, produced no progress in Israel-Palestine relations. The British effectively sold the same real estate to two opposed parties and there has never been any solution except to divide the old Palestine Mandate in two; fixating on settlements is just a delaying action. There will be no resolution until the Arabs accept Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist as a Jewish state. Pretending to ignore Turkish posturing in the Arab world and saber-rattling at Israel, and the imposition of repressive measures within Turkey, has just encouraged more of it all. A retrenchment to the United States was disguised as a “pivot to Asia,” though not very successfully. There is general skepticism in the world that the United States has any staying power. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expenditure of nearly 58,000 American casualties and two trillion dollars has not produced any discernible strategic benefit for the United States and its allies, and has strained those alliances. The elimination of the Saddam Hussein government in Baghdad and the killing or immobilization of significant numbers of terrorists have been useful, but not cost-effective.

      There is no evidence that any serious strategic analysis has gone into any of this, but President Obama continues to claim that all developments are the product of his administration’s skillful diplomacy, “backed by force.” There is surprisingly wide acceptance within the United States of this now very familiar revisionist delusion. The disintegration of Ukraine was long seen as an occasion for patching relations with Russia and not as the central issue between the nativists and Western emulators in Central Europe, nor as the opportunity it is to extend the borders of the West and strengthen the hand of the party of international conciliation and domestic reform in Russia.

      Generally, the withdrawal of the United States from its former over-exposed Cold War involvement in every corner of the earth is a good thing, and regional balances are developing in Europe and East Asia. All regions should be able to manage their own affairs, and the rationale for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s launch of the United States into durable positions of normative and deterrent influence in Western Europe and the Far East has been made less urgent by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and by the comparative embrace of rational national behavior by the Chinese. Such withdrawals are more a demonstration of the success of the containment policy pursued between the Roosevelt/Truman administrations and those of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, than a manifestation of durable American irresolution. But such comprehensive initiatives should be carefully planned and executed and explained, and not just left to devolve in a series of inelegant improvisations as they have.

      It remains a fortunate time for a country to lose its capacity for correct strategic analysis and policy formulation and execution. Western Europe is not under threat, and Germany is now tentatively exercising its potential, for the third time, as Europe’s greatest power, but this time, unlike the imperial and Nazi experiences, in close alliance with its neighbors and trans-Atlantic allies, and entirely as a champion of democratic government and human liberty. This transformation of a unified Germany must rank as one of the very greatest achievements of American statesmanship, and one which will bear the fruit of stability and prosperity in Europe for a very long time. As this is written, Germany is instrumental in the apparent victory of the Western emulators over the Russian nativists and annexationists in Ukraine, despite the Russian seizure of Crimea, and possibly some other ethnic Russian sections of Ukraine as a consolation prize for its definitive loss of that central country that it had occupied for two centuries. China is flexing its muscles in the manner of inexperienced new powers (like Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt), but is not really threatening anyone. And it should be possible to help coordinate a containment strategy, to the extent one is required, with Japan, India, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Burma (where the Chinese overplayed their hand and have effectively been evicted as the chief influence). In Latin America, the economically sensible and reasonably democratic countries are steadily outpacing the detritus of the Castroite left in Argentina, Venezuela, and a few other countries.

      As usual, except when countries have their backs to the wall and the United States is their principal hope for salvation, America’s allies are happy enough to have a rather feckless regime floundering through these recent years in Washington, apart from the continuing accrual of very large government deficits in the United States. These deficits are made more unsettling by the fact that they are largely financed not by arm’s-length auctions of government securities, but by the U.S. Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the Treasury, purporting to “buy” the unsold securities with the issuance of notes for the purpose. The contribution of the United States to monetary instability has been very serious and uninterrupted throughout the Obama presidency. This defies

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