http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/late-to-the-challenge-diminishing-american-leadership-in-the-age-of-terror?f=puball
INTRODUCTION:
A year ago, in trying to make the case for a much diminished role in foreign affairs for the United States, a well known conservative institute in Washington argued our current policies were still linked to our perception of the then Soviet Cold War threat, not the new realities of today.
They even argued: “Soviet war plans for Europe that are now public were primarily defensive; they assumed Soviet forces would be responding to a NATO attack.”
Their claim was two-fold: Not only were they claiming our policy today was based on a threat that no longer existed, but the threat we thought existed during the Cold War was in their view equally bogus.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
The conventional wisdom is that Americans are “war weary”. Many on both the right and left want to eliminate what has been described as America’s “hegemonic pretensions”, what is sometimes referred to as putting an end to our “seeking dragons to slay” or as President John Adams put it “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”. More colloquially, Americans do not want to be the “world’s policeman”. Fair enough.
It is one thing to analyze the extent of our security challenges of the past and differ with conventional wisdom. It is quite again another matter to invent a history to use such a distortion to justify a new policy for today that minimizes threats, promotes isolationism, and to put it bluntly, is blind to reality.
As such, we may be entering the most dangerous and momentous time since the end of World War II at the same time when we are very much unprepared.
Just as we were late after 1945 in understanding the nature of the challenge of what would become known as the Cold War, so we today have not been willing to honestly face the serious security challenges of our time, especially the poisonous coalition of rogue state sponsors of terror and their jihadi affiliates.
Just at the time this threat is getting more serious, the United States and its allies have been content to push for declining defense budgets and meeting fewer security obligations. This has and is making it increasingly difficult to find the leadership necessary to lead a coalition of nations to defeat the threats we face.