[Lingster]

Oh, and as far as letting another nation be the earth's emergency number to dial… and I honestly write this with all due respect to the other citizens of the world:  who do you wanna nominate?  :-

But that's the point – the rest of the world still wants the U.S. to do the work, it just wants to tell us how and when it should be done.

[Lingster]

Oh, good Christ, let's not talk about Woodrow Wilson.  Self-righteous clown.

[Lingster]

She's perfect.

[Lingster]

Yes, the European Union struggles with bureaucracy. At least we 're not staging wars. You know why?

Because you've used up your quota?

[Lingster]

The analogy for nuclear submarines would be a retaliatory return strike capability that could survive any initial attack.  No one has ever had that before.  The Athenians certainly didn't.  See, the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet carries enough warheads to level any foe or collection of foes.  So even if mainland defenses, the air force and surface navy were destroyed, there'd still be the submarine force, waiting quietly beneath the waves.

Still, if the Chinese started walking toward us they would shortly drown.  If the Pacific Ocean froze over to allow them to walk over it they would shortly starve.  That's the thing – we have thousands of miles of ocean between us and any potential threat.  We're as close to unassailable as any country has ever been.  When the U.S. goes down it will be because we've been nuked or because we've succumbed to internal division.  Invasion won't have anything to do with it.

Deep down, people are not all the same.  Deep down, people are not all good.  I believe that man is ugly and corrupt, and people who believe otherwise are naive.  That's why I believe in limited government – so that no one man or collection of men has total power.  And despite my distrust of the U.S. Government, I look around the world and see that it is head and shoulders above nearly all the rest.

The UN is a nest of dictators and kleptocrats, and the EU is gigantic bureaucracy not answerable to the citizens of its member countries.  Both are feckless.  You say there's a better way, but we're at the high water mark in human development, right now, and that's largely the result of an international system developed by the U.S. and its WW2 allies, and enforced by the U.S. ever since.

[Lingster]

And in case people aren't clear on this, Iran declared war on the United States in 1979 and has never done anything to indicate that it has changed our status as a belligerent.  Iran is waging war against the United States at this very moment – shipping bombs and covert operatives into Afghanistan and Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers.

It is insane for us to allow this to go on, and it would be even more insane for us to allow Iran to acquire nukes.  I would rather see Iran destroyed than to see it possess nuclear weapons.  And since we're pulling from ancient history, let me say Persia delenda est.

[Lingster]

Trying to engineer people or societies is folly – that's the domain of socialists, communists and other utopians.  Governments cannot make the world a better place – all they can do is stay out of the way and let people make it a better place.  It's largely an effect of commerce.
 
Things happen as they will – the job of the U.S. for the last 60 years and for the foreseeable future is to keep order in the world.  And yes, we try to make the sort of order that is agreeable to us.  But we make the world safe for commerce, and that's very important.

You Europeans gripe at our goals for stability, and you balk at our goals for improvement.  But you're not willing to do what you need to do to be taken seriously, which is increase your military spending.  That's where your Peloponnesian War comparisons fall flat, because there is no rival power.  Even if the United States should face massive defeat somewhere overseas, with hundreds of thousands of dead military personnel and the sinking of our surface fleet, there is no country or league of countries capable of mounting an invasion of the United States.  Plus we also have a substantial number of nuclear submarines, something Athens lacked.

If missile defense can be made to work, the largest homeland threat we'll face is enemies smuggling nuclear weapons into our territory.  (Since Iran sneaks weapons into other countries as a major element of its foreign policy, it would thus be folly to allow Iran to acquire nukes.)

[Lingster]

If you studied history you'd know everything eventually falls apart.  I'm not proposing a permanent solution to the world's problems because there is no permanent solution.  But for the next 30 or 50 years or so, the U.S. is likely to continue to be the dominant power in the world.

You could do a lot worse.  You Greeks have, in fact, done a lot worse in that past.

[Lingster]

As I said, the world isn't fair.  There is no such thing as international law to any degree that matters, because international bodies have no real enforcement power.  So metaphors about neighbors' houses don't work, because my neighbor can call the police but Eritrea cannot.  (And if international bodies were somehow endowed with that kind of power, they would quickly turn into tyrannical entities because with no constituency they'd have no accountability.)

Real power in this world is represented by the ability to project military force and generate or control trade.  Much of Europe has had to do very little to protect itself for the last 60 years because the U.S. has done it for them.  We did this to guarantee trade and protect our strategic position.  Likewise, countries like Mexico and Canada have gone about 140 and 200 years, respectively, without significant armed activity on their territory, at least in part because of their proximity to the United States.  South America has been blessedly free from large-scale war, substantially as a result of the 1823 U.S. "Monroe Doctrine" – declaring the Western Hemisphere off-limits to foreign colonization and proxy wars.  Why did the U.S. have a right to make such a declaration?  Because we could back it up.  And that prevented Spain and France from re-colonizing Latin America.

Conversely, the Philippines went through such heartache and devastation during World War II because the U.S. did not have sufficient power to project in the Western Pacific.  Japan was able to seize the territory and commit all sorts of horrors.  Also, while the U.S. was preoccupied with its Civil War (1861-1865), France violated the Monroe Doctrine and invaded Mexico, setting up a short-lived puppet regime.

We don't want anyone's territory, and we don't want to take anyone's resources without paying for them.  It's called the "Pax Americana", and everybody's free to love it or not.  But if someone actually attempts to challenge it, like Iran, then we have the power and the justification to squash them.  There's too much at stake for us to worry about trivial-minded European attempts to assign moral equivalence between the United States and Iran.

[Lingster]

We used nuclear weapons in 1945, and then not once since.  Which is probably part of the problem, because now everyone thinks we never will.  Afghanistan would have been the perfect object lesson.  Its main exports are opium, rugs and crazy.  Almost nothing of useful value comes from there.

The only thing that keeps the peace is fear.  The world ought to fear us more – the United States ought to be acting more like an empire and less like a big Switzerland.  I honestly have no idea why there are still inmates at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay.  It's been years, and every single one of them ought to have been released or hanged by now.

It doesn't need to be fair when we tell Iran not to have nukes (although even that objection is insane, btw).  The world isn't fair.  The people of the United States don't want Iran to have nukes and that's all the reason anybody needs, because we can back it up.

[Author]

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