ENGAGED INDEPENDENCE

No quite so bad afterall (Victor Davis Hanson, July 25, 2003, townhall.com)

After the Cold War we may seem an imperial power of sorts. But it is a funny sort of hegemony that seeks foreign input, pays dearly for bases, extends aid, encourages the spread of often noisy and cranky democracies, and intervenes in distant places like Serbia to stop mass murder when others more proximate and calculating would not. The shrillness of South Korea, Jordan, Egypt or the Palestinians is explicable not because of their anger at our intrusiveness but due to worries that we may in fact either pull out troops, cut off aid or simply wash our hands of the whole mess.

And for our part in this brave new world? The real danger is not that the allies, neutrals and international organizations are tiring of us, but rather that we are tiring of many of them. In consequence, our troops will be redeployed in South Korea, removed from Germany and Saudi Arabia, and downsized in Turkey, as we seek alternatives: more carriers, arms depots and caches, and smaller bases with new Eastern European hosts. America, in fact, is fashioning a policy that neither undermines international accords, but is not captive to them either.

Call the new American rethinking "engaged independence" if you will, but we are neither withdrawing from the world nor going back to working in quite the same way under the old protocols that so often proved themselves both impotent and amoral.

That seems a useful phrase--"Engaged independence"--reflecting that America and the free world are best served by a United States that is engaged in the world's affairs but not bound too tightly by international institutions and laws that too frequently are designed to serve the unfree world. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2003 7:31 AM