The Sanity Gap 

Sometimes your capacity for irony gets overloaded, and you find yourself at a loss for laughter. You are able to muster only a wry smile for something that merits a hoot, a guffaw, or floor-slapping hysteria.

So it was the other day when I read a headline in the pro-war and pro-Israel Wall Street Journal. The headline was “Self-Defense Sans Frontieres.”

This of course is a play on the name of the French humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders. The article, by Ruth Wedgwood of Johns Hopkins University and the Council on Foreign Relations, was an attempt to justify Israel’s latest bombing raid of a neighboring country, in this case Syria.

Self-Defense Without Borders! How perfect! Not only for Israel, but for the United States. Two of the most militarily powerful countries on earth claim the right to “defend” themselves, well, anywhere on the planet, borders notwithstanding. This is why the U.S. Government can insist that its “preemptive” war on Iraq was defensive, not aggressive.

The U.S. Government’s insistence that it was threatened by Iraq would have been more believable if more disinterested parties had been warning us that Iraq posed a grave peril to us, and that we’d better do something about it, pronto. Unfortunately, the disinterested parties, including traditionally friendly countries, said just the opposite. And mounting evidence is proving them quite right. As objective people saw all along, Saddam Hussein had no means to hurt us, and even if he had had that phantom arsenal, he wasn’t crazy enough to use it. When war came, he couldn’t even defend his own frontieres.

Why does the United States persist in hysteria about its security? It is beyond any comparison the most powerful country that has ever existed. It is shielded by two oceans. Its two immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are peaceable and feeble. Where’s the threat?

Contrast Belgium. It’s a tiny country among far bigger countries, several of which have nuclear weapons, which it lacks. It has been overrun and conquered by its neighbors a number of times in the past and could be quickly defeated again. So why isn’t poor little Belgium, rather than the mighty United States, obsessed with military safety and potential threats? We could ask the same question of any number of the world’s vulnerable mini-powers.

Perhaps the Bible gives us a clue. The book of Proverbs tells us, “The guilty flee when no man pursueth.” If you make a habit of throwing your weight around, you’ll come to expect to be hated.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, some Americans gloated that the United States was now the world’s only remaining superpower, or what one pundit happily called the “omni-power.” That should have been enough. If that unrivaled, unchallengeable American power had been used wisely, we would have had no enemies to speak of — certainly none worth worrying about.

But like a billionaire who spends himself into bankruptcy, the United States, its only real enemy having ceased to exist, continued its Cold War habit of global intervention sans frontieres, especially in the Middle East. It managed to overextend its colossal power, just as, despite its enormous wealth, it kept compounding its colossal national debt. We have not only the most puissant government in the world, but the most overweening.

There is simply no reason to go on living this way, ignoring practical and constitutional limits and defying the prudent advice of our Founding Fathers. The Belgians may not have our material advantages, but they have something we sorely lack: sanity. Small, weak countries have to maintain a sense of proportion. So should big, strong countries, but of course they are naturally tempted to forget their limitations.

The United States now has a bad case of hubris, obvious to everyone but ourselves. And one of the marks of hubris is resentment when others call attention to it. Some Americans are actually calling the French our enemy for opposing the Iraq war. Apparently you can only be our friend if you are willing to be our lackey.

We should be grateful to the French, the Belgians, the Germans, and all our true old friends who have risked our wrath in order to restore our perspective. Maybe when our petulant mood has passed, we’ll come to appreciate what they have tried to do for us.

Joseph Sobran