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But if you spend on that scale without any strategic clarity or hardheaded calculation of your national interest it is ultimately as decadent and useless as throwing money at Solyndra or Obamacare or any of the other domestic follies. A post-prosperity America will mean perforce a shrunken presence on the global stage. And we will not like the world we leave behind.

It was bound to happen. The nature of our voting process nearly ensures that we swing from one direction to the other every 4 to 8 years, and every leader spends a fair amount of time and money trying to bring the Titanic around from port to starboard, or vice versa. The result is a staggering path leading nowhere in particular. A leading nation must be consistent. The reason Great Britain was able to lead for so long, I suspect, is because they had monarchs who were able to remain at the helm for decades at a time. Nothing says stability like a queen who hangs in there for over half a century.

Americans are the best people on earth. But they are still just people.

I don't know...the British have certainly not been leading lights in dealing with Islam (well, since the turn of the last century), regardless of having had the same queen for 50 years. They have, after all, had many different governments with differing policies during that same period.

The problem is simply lack of confidence in and committment to the national project.

History will be devastating in its indictment of us for our squandering of the “unipolar” moment.

GWB started off strong but he backed down immediately when confronted by the multicultis, whom he regarded as his intellectual betters, and after winning Iraq, blithely let it adopt a constitution that enshrined Islam (sharia, specifically) as the source of all laws and specified that nothing could conflict with Islam. Small wonder that the Iraqis are now driving out the Christians, to the point that there was even an article about it in the WSJ today and one Christian was quoted as lamenting the passing of Saddam because at least he protected Christians.