By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 16, 2017
The world equates American military power with the
maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and
travel.
Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive
interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to
translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.
But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it
is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role
in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are
democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in
dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.
These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of
China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian
Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.
In the Middle East, there are two places that
consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous
region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have
ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have
few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is
surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab
Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.
For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the
Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its
swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not
transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the
Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.
Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept
their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed
neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.
America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece,
although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they
have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is
a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of
Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to
formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has
preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.
Without the United States, there would never have emerged
a free and independent Taiwan and South Korea. The former would have been
absorbed by communist China in 1949. The latter would have been wiped out in
1950 by Chinese-sponsored North Korea. Today, Taiwan and South Korea are models
of international citizenship, democracy, and prosperity. They have given the
world singular products and brands, from Foxconn and Quanta Computer to Samsung
and Kia.
Given their relatively small areas, Taiwan and South
Korea likely would not have survived Chinese bullying or, more recently, North
Korean nuclear provocations without strong American support and protection.
Our relationships with all of these vulnerable nations
are as much practical as principled. All follow international law. All have
sent gifted citizens to the U.S. All are fiercely self-reliant and are reputed
to be among the world’s best fighters.
To visit any of these countries is to experience islands
of sanity and decency in neighborhoods of violence and madness. Will these
unique but vulnerable nations survive?
In the Middle East, age-old enemies are on the move.
There is the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism, the specter of a nuclear
Iran, and a newly aggressive Turkey.
Kurdistan is threatened variously by Iraq, Iran, and
Turkey.
Iran periodically boasts that it will soon destroy
Israel. Iran’s clients in Lebanon and Syria brag that they can launch thousands
of missiles into the Jewish state.
Greece is bankrupt and overrun by hundreds of thousands
of immigrants, most of them young, male, and Muslim. Turkey systematically
violates Greek national waters and airspace.
South Korea and Taiwan are both threatened by North
Korea’s nuclear-tipped missiles. China periodically warns them that they need
to make the necessary subservient adjustments in their foreign policy to
accommodate a rising China and a supposedly declining America.
America itself is $20 trillion in debt and divided. It
has lost global credibility after years of issuing phony red lines and
deadlines to various rivals and enemies.
The U.S. military is in sore need of repair and
expansion. Much of the country is sick and tired of costly interventions that
could not turn battlefield success into stability, much less into lasting
strategic advantage.
Yet a country is not just defined by its economic and
military strength, its global clout or its powerful allies. It is also judged
on how it treats weaker but humane nations. As long as the U.S. remains good to
these impressive but vulnerable states, it will remain great as well.
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