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How Many Enemies?
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 How
can the United States defend itself in the
future? Some learned minds are wrestling with this question as new forms of
conflict take shape.  In the past wars were fought on battlefields the way
football is played in stadiums. International law worked out rules of
engagement to which most governments subscribed most of the time.
“Alas,” writes former
undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle in the Wall Street
Journal, “America’s future enemies may not fight
according to these Marquess of Queensbury rules.” Mr. Ikle foresees
the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare “in that
unanticipated region of warfare — the United States itself.” No
force on earth can stand up to American military power on the battlefield, so
we can expect future enemies to ignore the old codes. Some of these
prospective enemies may not even be governments.
“Past experience with
terrorism is a poor guide for such a contingency,” Mr. Ikle observes.
Indeed. Such tactics as killing or kidnapping a few civilians may someday
seem as quaint as the 78-rpm phonograph.
What would happen if a nuclear
device devastated the heart of Washington, D.C. — and our surviving
government officials didn’t even know who had detonated it? That
wouldn’t be “terrorism,” which is essentially a
psychological tactic whose perpetrators usually claim responsibility; it would
be a substantial act of war, by an enemy who might be impossible either to
identify or locate.
The only sure result would be
panic. There would be no point in surrendering; the damage would have been
done, and a formal, Appomattox-style ceremony, with U.S. officials yielding
to a tiny cell of expert bombers, would be absurd. But we can be certain that
the official response would be a crackdown — on the remaining liberties
of U.S. citizens, the only people our government could control.
One reason it might be hard to
pinpoint the enemy is that our government is making so many enemies. The
United States dominates the globe, and many foreigners just can’t
comprehend that we are the good guys. In terms of their own cultures and
interests, we may appear to them as the bad guys.
The narrow-minded Russians
don’t see why NATO should push up against their borders by including
their neighbors, while excluding Russia itself. The pig-headed Arabs, Iranians,
and others think the United States is making war on Islam. The self-centered
Chinese consider us aggressive prigs who are muscling in on
“their” part of the world. Small-minded Latin Americans think
the United States is a bully.
Maybe all these people are wrong.
And there are still many others around the world who like Americans. But the
question is whether we can afford to antagonize so many people indefinitely.
It’s possible to be absolutely in the right and stupid at the same time.
If the people who hate us
can’t drive us out of their regions, some of them may want to bring
the fight here. It would take only a sophisticated handful of weapons experts,
out of several billion people. They wouldn’t think of themselves as
evildoers; they might see themselves as Luke Skywalker destroying the
imperial Death Star.
The old European empires never
had to worry about this, for the simple reason that most of their colonial
peoples had only the most primitive weapons and no way to reach European
capitals; retaliation was unimaginable. When the white man had a monopoly of
gunpowder, the odds were so lopsided that the Europeans hardly thought of
their Asian, African and American conquests as wars; “wars”
were affairs between European states.
So far, Americans have paid for
their empire only in the high taxes needed to sustain military forces that go
far beyond any real defensive needs. Mr. Ikle doesn’t use the word
empire; he uses the customary formula, defense of American
interests, which can cover anything, anywhere. But an empire it is, even
if we prefer to call it world leadership, and the price could rise with
stunning suddenness.
The best defense is not to make
enemies in the first place. But this elementary prudence is now called
“isolationism” (though it might better be called
“multiculturalism”). If a big American city goes up in a
mushroom cloud, isolationists will look like prophets.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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