Now this colossus, in the language of Prof. Kennedy, has been "stupefying to the Russian and Chinese military, worrying to the Indians, and disturbing to proponents of a common European defense policy." Because, in military terms, we are the only player. We spend more than the next nine largest national-defense budgets combined. And this rise in military power is the result of providential developments.
Twenty years ago the Soviet Union was struggling for nuclear supremacy, and Japan was assumed to be the economic behemoth of the ensuing decade. Exit Russia as a potential aggressor — they have left only nuclear bombs, and these, in modern warfare, are all but useless. And exit Japan, which is left behind, engrossed in learning simple economic arithmetic.
Then we've had in America the explosion of technological prowess. At the meeting of the cyber people in San Francisco on Monday, we learned that Moore's Law has been anachronized. That law was the hubristic fancy of the scientist Gordon Moore, who toyed with the idea back in 1965 that every 18 months, the power of a computer chip would double. What discredited Moore's fantasy is, we learn, that chips will increase in power a lot faster than that. Add to it all the increase in United States economic power, and lo, the creature that sprung from the loins of America the Beautiful dominates the air, land, and sea.
"It is as if, among the various inhabitants of the apes and monkeys cage at the London Zoo, one creature had grown bigger and bigger — and bigger — until it became a 500 lb. gorilla. It couldn't help becoming that big, and in a certain way America today cannot help being what it is either," writes Kennedy.
The implications of it all are enormous, causing us concern less for the old maxim that we ought not to get involved in the affairs of other nations, than concern over the implications of failing to get involved when a sophisticated political and strategic polity tell us how much American power is needed. Not to colonize, but to help ensure stability and keep the muscles of our allies in shape, so that they can render critical service in predictable crisis-points, this being an age when a half dozen rowdy nations have realistic prospects of putting their hands on the ultimate weapons, biological and chemical, and of course nuclear.
See article at:[url]http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley020502.shtml[/url]
Eric The(Approving)Hun[>]:)]