America may be the world’s “indispensable nation,’’ as Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, but most Americans, most of the time, are uncomfortable with the idea of US global hegemony. John Quincy Adams wrote long ago that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’’ As the polls consistently suggest, that isolationist sentiment still resonates.
But in Adams’s day America was not the mightiest, wealthiest, and most influential nation on the face of the earth. Today it is. The United States is the world’s only superpower, and if we shirk the role of global policeman, no one else will fill it. By nature Americans are not warmongering empire-builders; their uneasiness about dominating other countries reflects a national modesty that in many ways is admirable — and that belies the caricature of Uncle Sam as arrogant bully or “great Satan.’’
Nevertheless, with great power come great responsibilities, and sometimes one of those responsibilities is to destroy monsters: to take down tyrants who victimize the innocent and flout the rules of civilization. If neighborhoods and cities need policing, it stands to reason the world does too. And just as local criminals thrive when cops look the other way, so do criminals on the world stage.
Nazi Germany had conquered half of Europe and Japan was brutalizing much of Asia by the time America finally entered World War II. If America hadn’t rescued Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1990, no one else would have, either. If America hadn’t led NATO in halting Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, no one else would have, either. If America hadn’t faced down the Soviet Union during the long years of the Cold War, no one else would have, either — and hundreds of millions of human beings might still be trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
