A kinder, gentler "super power" is no match for reality

Time after time, Western leaders have convinced themselves that magnanimity is a better defense than military preparedness. Until the next attack. Is Obama about to lead us on another cycle?

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From Preparedness to Appeasement

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Victor Davis Hanson

National Review

September 2, 2009

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EXCERPT:

We may experience another attack like 9/11, given that many terrorists must now believe that the United States either cannot or will not go after them in the manner of the last eight years.Many jihadists must feel that the new government in Washington is more likely to contextualize their hatred than ensure it does not spread or materialize into war. Regional bad actors — take your pick, from Ahmadinejad to Chávez to Kim to Putin —may feel it is about time to make regional adjustments in the balance of power, given their impressions that the United States is almost sympathetic to their frustrations and believes that Bush ineptness and bad faith, not the intrinsic agendas of such antidemocratic, ambitious powers, caused prior tension.

And once we experience such “adventurism,” the reaction is just as scripted. We will want tougher CIA interrogators to ensure there is no more suicide mass murdering. Attorney General Eric Holder will go the way of Louis Johnson. Congress will hold hearings on who shut down Guantanamo and freed the terrorists. White papers will be issued detailing how the Obama administration curtailed proactive national-security measures. Committees will blast the creation of needless “firewalls” between agencies. Senators will call for more aid to Colombia or Georgia or South Korea or Israel or (fill in the blank).

The cycle will play out as in the past, because, in this age of enlightenment, affluence, and leisure, we just cannot accept that human nature remains the same and thus predictable. It remains too depressing to concede that for a few evil opportunists good will is seen not as magnanimity to be appreciated, but as weakness to be tested. And who but a dunce would believe that continual military preparedness is far cheaper — and more humane — than the perpetual “peace dividend” and lowering of our defenses?

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.