Kennedy also writes, “The United States is unchallenged militarily and sees no rival Great Power in sight. Yet it has taken little comfort from this. Since 9/11, it feels less secure and is spending massive amounts on armaments.”
Again, the historical comparison doesn’t work. It wasn’t a Great Power who attacked us on September 11 -- it was a small group of state-supported terrorists. We are doing all we can to eliminate those terrorists, by dismantling the regimes that support them.
Afghanistan was first, then Iraq. The Bush administration has issued stern warnings to North Korea and Syria -- and, since our overwhelming victory in Iraq they seem to be responding.
As for Kennedy’s charge that we’re spending massive amounts on weapons, well, military spending today is about 3.2 percent of gross domestic product. That may seem like a lot, but it is less than half of the 6.8 percent we averaged from 1950-2001. We’re getting much more for less than ever before.
Kennedy closes with Rudyard Kipling’s famous lines about the “White Man’s burden,” and a warning that our government should beware the perils of empire building. Washington, of course, is already well aware of those perils.
As Secretary of State Colin Powell said in January, we have lost many soldiers overseas in the last 100 years and, “have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home…to live our own lives in peace.”
There is a historical parallel here -- but Kennedy missed it. We can’t simply withdraw to our borders and pretend problems elsewhere don’t affect us. That’s the lesson of September 11.
By taking out Saddam Hussein, we’ve already improved Iraq. Soon, Iraqis will govern it and we will leave it for good, as a far better place. And the U.S. will remain what we have been for decades, something that’s without historical precedent: The world’s only empire that didn’t seek territorial conquest, and tried instead to protect itself by improving life for others.