Gulliver unbound means that the United States after 9/11 could make an end run around the Lilliputians to appeal to coalitions of the willing to help in the fight against evil in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the United Nations or other international groups would not approve, independent nations could become allies in important ways: by recognizing the specific threat, supporting our approach to resolving it and by contributing resources. George W. Bush added a fourth component, introducing democracy in the Arab and Muslim world where self-government is an alien concept.
Gulliver thus becomes considerably bolder and more aggressive than Swift imagined. Swift himself was a deeply devout Christian, and did not believe, as many of his contemporaries of the Enlightenment did, that man can on his own transcend human limitations. Swift appealed to the moral and spiritual qualities - in a word, faith - that separate man from beast and enable him to rise above his animal nature. The Enlightenment never lived up to its promise that man could become perfect, or even move very far toward perfectibility. The Nazis and now the Islamists have proved that in our own era.
If we are to see America as Gulliver among Lilliputians, Gulliver should be perceived as an awkward, imperfect, but gentle giant who must not allow those with Lilliputian agendas to tie us down. We no longer have the optimism we felt when the statue of Saddam Hussein came tumbling down in Baghdad. The radical Iraqi insurgence is more widespread than we anticipated, perhaps because we eased the pressure in places like Fallujah in deference to the Lilliputians. Nevertheless, the Iraqi people are better off for our intervention. They have been freed from a dictator whose brutality rivals any in history. The Iraqis can speak freely, read and write freely and are pressing toward authentic elections.
Our own interests have been served. Gulliver unbound fosters democracy and pursues the war against Islamist terrorism, with no help from the Lilliputians. But attitudes and international organizations can change. Many European would bypass the U.N. if their own interests weighed in the balance. If Gulliver indulged no Utopian hopes, as one critic of Swift notes, "he also never gave way to cheap cynicism."