Essay: Can America Stand Alone?

Has there ever been a more reluctant superpower than America? Has any great power taken less pleasure in its foreign adventures? I doubt it. As shown yet again in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. is the world leader, and Americans hate the job. The idea that the world is an arena of unending conflict repels Americans. It means that a superpower's work is never done.

Don't we get time off? Just weeks after winning the cold war, we face a new war in the gulf. Like Americans going off to Korea just five years after V-J day, we feel uneasy, disappointed....

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