America's decline...

There was a surprisingly good show on the radio on the way home from work today (Sundays usually suck for good talk radio), and the guest on the show was an Australian political/history expert (whose name escapes me completely) who had some shockingly good points to make.

That America is in a decline is unquestionable... no matter what area you wish to discuss. Economically, politically, strategically, diplomatically... we are no match for our former greatness of even 20 years ago. Let's touch on that topic first...

For the first time in history, America has a black President... yet the nation is more divided racially than it has been since the 1970s. Yes, we saw the "Rodney King" riots more than a decade ago, but that was an isolated incident that shocked both the black and white population of America when it happened. Now, talk that would never have been accepted as "mainstream" by the media even ten years ago is defended by the likes of the NAACP, the Democratic National Committee, and most of the major media outlets and their sponsors. People like Rev. Wright, who say almost the exact same racist things that David Duke and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said as recently as two decades ago, are held up as heroes of the age by the very institutions and organizations that came together to fight racism in all its manifestations.

Our ability to project force abroad to protect American interests has been compromised... not by nearly nine years of continuous warfare on two fronts (although that has cost us), but by a general movement from the Left that makes our soldiers and sailors less than heroic and more like criminal in their efforts. The goals and objectives they were directed to achieve are now questioned, found wanting, and discarded without a second thought by people with no contextual understanding of what took them there in the first place. This problem is compounded by a general tendency of the Left to allow national defense and security to lapse into mediocrity as the world becomes more and more dangerous around us. In a time when the US military should be the most feared and respected fighting force on the face of the earth because of the combat experience the vast majority of our service men and women have, it is seen as compromised and in decline for the very same reasons... not by our enemies, but by our own people.

Not all that long ago, nations and states would think twice about ANY foreign policy issue that might conflict with American interests. Now, many seem to employ or adopt policy specifically because it DOES conflict with American interest, and they know that nothing will come of it because the US doesn't back its words with actions anymore. Places like Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela, Pakistan, the Sudan... all would have trembled at the thought of starting a policy or course of action that brought them into conflict with American interests... but since 2005, that hasn't been the case. China now dictates to the US where and when it will conduct military exercises with allies and partners in the region... not the Pentagon. North Korea threatens, and the US complies. Venezuela shouts, and the US cows down.

Now we see the ascendancy of the fundamentalist Muslim sects and states. Do we blame the American decline on the rise of fundamentalist Islam? Or is fundamentalist Islam rising because America is declining? The analogy made during my afore mentioned radio show was to the fall of Rome in the Fifth Century... Did Rome fall because the barbarians were getting stronger? No... the barbarians got stronger because Rome got weaker. The phrase "barbarians at the gates" stems from the works of Gibbon in the late 18th Century... but the barbarians he was writing about weren't sacking Rome because they hated it and wanted it destroyed. They sacked it because they wanted to be ROMANS... and they saw taking and destroying that which they couldn't have as the quickest way to getting what they wanted. They wanted the power and prestige that was ROME... and ended up destroying that which they most wanted.

That analogy doesn't work here, though. The "barbarians" we are facing are two-fold: 1) domestic barbarians that hate all that America stands for because we were SUCCESSFULL and RIGHT in our determined course, and 2) foreign barbarians that really do hate us because we stand as an example of all they cannot give their own people through their failed governments and societies. Obama and the Left are examples of the first, and radical Islam is an exmaple of the latter.

More later... must eat.