Friday, September 09, 2005

Is Our Foreign Policy Strange?

I love Victor Davis Hanson’s article about “our strange foreign policy.” Looked at objectively, our current foreign policy defies categorization. It is so multifaceted that every ideological group can find elements it has long supported while simultaneously finding elements that it despises.

VDH says, “I don’t know what we should call all of this. But so far, no foreign-policy expert has come up with a non-partisan and intellectually honest diagnosis.” He suggests that the whole of it is designed to bring greater peace and security to the entire international community as well as here at home. He concludes with an interesting and strange metaphor.
Perhaps it is a Zen-like mood we are in, of gradually allowing others to come to the fore, albeit with a warning “Go ahead, make my day, and see if you can do any better on your own.”

With the smoke of gunfire yet in the air, the marshal is backing slowly out of the crowded and creepy saloon, but staring down outlaws and with six-guns still drawn.
It sounds like American Exceptionalism to me.

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