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The World Isn’t So Dark: Ever since WWII, America has tended to make its strategic missteps by exaggerating dangers. (Fareed Zakaria, 9/13/08, NEWSWEEK)

We live in remarkably peaceful times. A University of Maryland study shows that deaths from wars of all kinds have been dropping dramatically for 20 years and are lower now than at any point in the last half century. A study from Simon Fraser University finds that casualties from terrorism have been steadily declining since 9/11. It is increasingly clear—look at their voting from Indonesia to Iraq to Pakistan—that very few Muslims anywhere support Islamic fundamentalists. More countries than ever before now embrace capitalism and democracy.

It's also worth noting that ever since World War II, the United States has tended to make its strategic missteps by exaggerating dangers. During the 1950s, conservatives argued that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of appeasement because he was willing to contain rather than roll back communism. The paranoia about communism helped fuel McCarthyism at home and support for dubious regimes abroad. John Kennedy chose to outflank Nixon on the right by arguing that there was a dangerous missile gap between the Soviets and the United States (when in fact the United States had almost 20,000 missiles and the Soviets had fewer than 2,000). The 1970s witnessed a frenzied argument that the Soviet Union was surpassing the United States militarily and was about to "Finlandize" Europe. The reality, of course, was that when neoconservatives were arguing that the U.S.S.R. was about to conquer the world, it was on the verge of total collapse.

Mr. Zakaria is quite right that we consistently exaggerate the threats that the various isms have posed to us in the Long War. But note what he's missed in his own peroration: the peoples of Eastern Europe (and beyond) lived in a massive gulag into the '90s despite our ability to liberate them rather easily as early as the 40s. This utterly anti-Judeo-Christian notion--that our neighbor is none of our concern--is why the Realists are generally so marginal in our politics. And even though the best course might often be to let such systems collapse under their own weight -- which they'd do more quickly if we didn't provide the opposing half of the A-frame -- it's not in our nature to ignore the suffering they cause.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2008 8:50 AM