OPERATION REALITY DAWNS:

Why It’s Still a Unipolar Era: The world’s response to Libya has made clear that currently fashionable arguments about the ‘rise of the Rest’ and the world’s new ‘nonpolarity’ are simply untrue. (Dan Blumenthal, March 22, 2011, The American)

Sometimes it takes a crisis to dispense with intellectual fads. The world’s response to Libya has made clear that currently fashionable arguments about the “rise of the Rest” and the world’s new “nonpolarity” are simply untrue. Charles Krauthammer was wrong about one thing in his description of the “unipolar moment” at the end of the Cold War: We are not living in a unipolar moment, we are witnessing a unipolar era. Why? Because the “rest”—China and India—are unable and unwilling to lead.

The current fashion in foreign policy argumentation is to explain that America is in decline, particularly relative to Asia. The new declinists usually line up an impressive array of statistics that tell a story of India and China’s high rates of economic growth, military spending, energy consumption, and so on. The new declinists have a point—the raw numbers are impressive. But power is about much more than raw numbers. It is the most elusive concept in politics. It usually cannot be measured accurately until it is used.

The recent example of the West’s decision to use force against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is a case in point. The United States was supposed to be entering a new era of constraints, perhaps even decline, bound by a severe financial debt crisis and an unwillingness to properly fund our military forces. Moreover, we have a president as ambivalent about exercising American power as we have seen in a generation. President Obama did all he could to dither and procrastinate while Qaddafi butchered his people.

After all the hand-wringing, President Obama understood two things: the world order Washington needs demands that Qaddafi be stopped, and only America could stop him.

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