Whose Pax? Which Americana?

Ross’s back and forth with Dan McCarthy and Daniel Larison (see also Matt Yglesias and MB Dougherty) merits a nice long read. As a casual fan of direly necessary and highly trivial interventions, but a deep skeptic of those that fall in the middle, I really hope to distill the entire debate down to the following observation about modern world history:

Europe failed. This is almost the full explanation for American interventionism, and on its own merits it’s the decisive explanation. If the string of costly, bloody, and awful blunders that punctuated Pax Americana is, as Ross claims, ‘worth it’, that can only be on account of the alternative. And during the Cold War, the alternative really actually was the collapse of Western security, the systematic destruction of political liberty, and the global victory of communism. Fortunately, however, those times have ended. And even more fortunately, the time has ended when Europe was an irresponsible collection of states hellbent on one another’s destruction. Only because Europe committed suicide in the most brutal and disorderly of ways did the United States have to rise to the position of global intervenor. This was a tragedy for Europe and an extremely unnatural move for the US, and now both these things can be corrected and a more proper balance restored to world politics.

After the Great Wars, the only alternatives to European world domination were totalitarian Asian domination and American domination. This was a crap position to be in, and we were left holding the bag, but even worse than holding the bag was dropping the bag, and we powered through the long rotten episode at high, high cost but we did power through, and now we can and should find the way to stop. And that way involves resigning our commission as the only constituent country of Western civilization that can be counted on to successfully defend it.

To make this work, we badly need to restore Europe and Japan to security independence, and we need to continue to advance the interests of India, and we need maybe above all not to make enemies of the Russians. If Europe remains weak, if Japan remains toothless, if India falters, and if Russia is demonized, we lose — and we lose because our unnatural position of globally hegemonic intervention cannot, and should not, be maintained, much less intensified.

Thoughts?

(Image of ‘Industries of the British Empire’, British Empire Building, 620 Fifth Avenue, courtesy of Flickrer wallyg.)