(2 of 2)
For much of the world, the war on terrorism offers not just a free ride but a strategic bonus: American diminishment. France unabashedly declares that American dominance is intolerable and the world should by right be not unipolar but multipolar. Much of the rest of the world believes it but does not have France's nerve to say it.
The hard fact is that war on many fronts is consuming and containing American power. While America spends blood and treasure in faraway places like Baghdad, China builds the economic and military superpower of the future. Europe knits itself into another continental colossus. And the rest of the world goes about its business. Meanwhile, the Americans take on the axis of evil one by one.
In the 1990s, containment of America took a different form. With the acquiescence of a Democratic Administration uncomfortable with American power, silk ropes were fashioned to tie down Gulliver: a myriad of treaties, protocols and prohibitions on everything from carbon emissions to land mines to nuclear testing. With the advent of the Bush Administration, contemptuous of these restraints, that would no longer work. Enter al-Qaeda.
The neutrals may wax poetic about America's sins, but they do not hate us. The problem is not emotion, but calculation. At root, it is a matter of interests. Interests diverge. No use wailing about it. The grand alliances are dead. With a few trusted friends, America must carry on alone.