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All this is accompanied by a new isolationism, the notion that with the collapse of communism, there is not much left for America to do in the world, that the U.S. should circle the wagons. There is also economic isolationism, otherwise known as protectionism. And there is the isolationism of despair: the conviction that in winning the cold war, we spent so much of our treasure that we no longer have the means to exert much influence abroad -- that the U.S. is increasingly "irrelevant."
But that was a false view, even before events in the Persian Gulf suddenly made America very relevant indeed. The situation is not as simple as the declinists claim, our fate surely not that bleak. The 21st could and should be -- "to a significant degree" -- a Second American Century.
It is useful to look at that proposition from the perspective, however distant, of Luce's essay, which was an attack on the isolationism of his day.
It began with a slap. "We Americans are unhappy," wrote Luce. "We are nervous -- or gloomy -- or apathetic," as well as confused about the world. "And yet we also know that the sickness of the world is also our sickness. We, too, have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch. And nowhere in the world have men's failures been so little excusable as in the United States of America."
Published nine months before Pearl Harbor, Luce's essay conceded that fighting in World War II was not really necessary as a matter of defending "our homeland." The U.S. could be made impregnable and might live, "discreetly and dangerously," like "an infinitely mightier Switzerland."
So what would we be fighting for -- "Dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang?" Or "Shall we use some big words like 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'justice'?" Yes, Luce replied, of course. This does not mean that it is our task "to police the whole world nor to impose democratic institutions on all mankind including the Dalai Lama and the good shepherds of Tibet." But America must primarily blame herself if "the world environment in which she lives" is "unfavorable to the growth of American life." And our only chance to make our democracy work is as part "of a vital international economy" and "an international moral order."
To a large extent, Luce pointed out, it already was the American Century, because of the influence of American culture and products. But more was required: the spread of free enterprise, because it could not prevail in America "if it prevails nowhere else," and of freedom, because "without Freedom, there can be no abundant life, but with Freedom, there can be."
So the U.S. must now be "the Good Samaritan of the entire world," helping feed "all the people of the world who . . . are hungry and destitute." But such efforts will fail unless animated by American ideals -- love of freedom, equality of opportunity, self-reliance but also cooperation, together with "all the great principles of Western civilization" -- justice, truth, charity. "It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread . . . and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the psalmist called a little lower than the angels." Other nations can "survive," but America can endure only if its veins are filled with "the blood of purpose and enterprise and high resolve."