‘Go Home, America’The world's rising powers want the United States out of their neighborhoods.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
February 14, 2022
Because America entered both world wars of the 20th century last, while all the other great powers bled one another, and because we outlasted the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, America emerged, in the term of President George H.W. Bush, as “the last superpower.”
We had it all. We were the “indispensable nation.” We saw further into the future. We could impose our “benevolent global hegemony” on all mankind. And so it was that we set out to create a “new world order,” plunging into successive wars in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, Libya, Yemen.
So doing, we bled ourselves, distracted ourselves, exhausted ourselves and sundered ourselves, until half the country was echoing George McGovern’s 1972 campaign slogan: “Come home, America.”
And as we went crusading for a new world order, Vladimir Putin’s Russia gradually recovered from its crushing Cold War defeat, and China began to move out of America’s shadow to become the most powerful rival modern America had ever faced.
Now, U.S. hegemony is being everywhere challenged—in Eastern Europe, the Near East, Southeast Asia, East Asia. And the challenges arise from autocrats united in their resolve to reduce the power and the presence of the United States in their part of the world.
All of America’s adversaries have something in common: They want us out of their neighborhood.
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The new correlation of forces:
North Korea has become a full-fledged nuclear power with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can hit the USA. Russia’s armed forces are more imposing than they were two decades ago. China has swept past every rival power to the United States, while America’s allies are less powerful and less united behind it.
Meanwhile, America has run up a national debt larger than the entire U.S. economy. Its trade deficits are at record levels. Its borders are being overrun by migrants from all over the world. And its disposition to intervene, engage and fight for democracy has rarely been lower.
The global stress test of the last superpower is on, and it is not likely we will pass it with a grade as high as the one we had earned by the Cold War’s end.
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/go-home-america/
