From this week's Spectator magazine -- the unbeatable Mark Steyn on the US mindset and the post-Iraq handover.
Here's a highlight:
Al-Qa’eda thinks it’s got America pegged: the hyperpower is an effete, fleshy sultan sprawled languorously on overstuffed cushions and lost in sensual distractions. The British historian Niall Ferguson’s characterisation isn’t so very different: the hyperpower is a ‘strategic couch potato’ burdened with debt and suffering from attention deficit disorder.
Like many of us neo-imperialists, Prof. Ferguson is a bit disappointed at the total lack of interest America has in opening up a colonial office in Washington and training up the Gertrude Bells of the 21st century. The United States has zero interest in empire, for obvious reasons. For one thing, it’s already as big as an empire, and most countries that controlled such a large land mass would probably run it in imperial fashion. Instead, America took a federation designed for a baker’s dozen of ethnically homogeneous East Coast colonies and successively applied it across the continent and into the South Pacific. It’s not strictly true that the sun never sets on the American Republic, but it’s up an awful lot of the time.
One consequence is that imperialism has absolutely no constituency in America. The principal advantage the colonies offered to the average Englishman in 19th-century Britain was that it enabled him to get out of the country — to go to New Zealand or Malaya or Canada, where land was cheaper, economic opportunities greater and the restrictions of class much looser. But if you’re American, you can get all that at home. And if all you want is a change of climate, you can move from Maine to Hawaii or from Florida to Alaska.
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