Power vacuum in the West?

It's easy to get distracted by the day-to-day alarums. The following is a quote from a piece by V.S. Naipaul, an astute observer and author of Among the Believers, a 1981 book that recounts his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia to assess how the Islamic faithful were dealing with the modern world. It is salutary Big Picture thinking and his whole article ought to be folded up in carried in the wallet or purse of every thinking person who thinks that the culture is worth preserving and that the government exists to do something more than hand out goodies and pork:

We could go on but think you’ll have the idea by now. While the West is plagued by lack of direction and indecision, the Asian powers – above all China – are going from strength to strength. Even Japan, which for a long time has had much in common with the basket-case economies of the EU, has decided to rejoin the Asian party: freshly re-elected Prime Minister Koizumi epitomises the kind of clarity of thought and leadership that is absent from so much of the West. We are on the brink of an historical watershed, the end of one era and the start of another. So far, the Asian powers have yet to build an international (as opposed to regional) military and geopolitical presence. When they do – and led by China and India they probably will in the next 10 years – the world will finally step out of the shadow of the Second World War into a new and uncertain dawn. The process is being accelerated not just by the rise of Asia but by a US and EU which have lost their ways. Today’s unipolar world, in which the world’s only hyper-power lives beyond its means, with massive current account and budget deficits funded by Chinese and Japanese central banks, and no longer has the guts, patience, skill and commitment to root out global terrorism and failed states, is an unstable, transitional state of affairs. The beneficiary will not be the EU, which has neither the military nor economic muscle to replace the US and is anyway in even faster decline. In ways that are uncertain and hard to divine, the balance of power is clearly switching from the Atlantic to East Asia. It will be a messy process, made all the worse by the drift of the US and EU. It will be a shift in power ripe for exploitation by those with the interests of neither the West nor East Asia at heart. No wonder al Qaeda is licking its lips.^[1]

Not to mention the Chinese. With an Islamic world that accounts for virtually nothing in the sciences, literature, the arts, business, education, technology or hip hop (did we miss anything?) and Mr. Naipaul's accurate assessment of the Western democracies as feckless and impotent, the conclusion is inescapable that the not too distant future will see a Chinese commercial, financial, and, maybe, military ascendancy. Rather than celebrate a rich cultural heritage, the Western democracies have fallen into the pit of multiculturalism unable to summon the will to assert the primacy of their own values. Fjordman’s description^[2] of the enormous damage inflicted on Scandinavia by “the extreme anti-masculine strand of feminism that has been pervasive in Scandinavia for decades” clearly demonstrates that Scandinavian men have been acculturated to abandon any semblance of their masculine duty to defend their own women, let alone their own culture or nation. Where is it much different in the West but for a matter of degree? It’s symptomatic of a dangerous breakdown in the West that has its origin in an unhealthy fixation on equality disconnected from any willingness to demand an adjunct responsibility, a pathological crippling of productive forces, a celebration of victimhood, an adoption of a dreamlike foreign policy, and a flaccid overreliance (by civilians) on precision munitions as a bulwark against the kinds of expense and casualties that are probably necessary to protect vital American interests. The Colonel will hazard a guess that the U.S. is wholly unprepared to deal with a serious threat to Middle East oil supplies, just as it is presently incapable of dealing with Saudi Arabia right now, the Saudi’s being (one of) the primary instigators of terror and the principal financiers of Wahhabism in case you hadn’t noticed. Ditto on the issue of dealing with the inexorable development of an Iranian nuclear arsenal. Mr. Bush has done better than his predecessor and it remains to be seen if his more recent pronouncements on the nature of the Islamic threat show a personal philosophical advance much past the “religion of peace” nonsense he mouthed earlier. Even so, it strikes the Colonel as highly unlikely that public opinion is really very energized on the issue of immigration, unassimilable Muslim immigrants, preemptive removal of Crazy Cat regimes that sponsor terror (hint: Iran, Syria), or life and death struggle over oil supplies. Mr. Bush can probably not count on much public support for any attempt to deal with these issues, even if he's personally eager to open up a can of Texas whoop ass, if you'll pardon a somewhat overused expression. That the American people were willing to serve up people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, nominate people like Mondale, Dukakis, Bush Sr., Dole, and Gore, and not rise up in indignation when Reagan bugged out after the bombing of the Marine Barracks and Clinton did the same after piddling losses in Somalia, pretty much tells you that the political process is deeply flawed or that the American people have an unerring instinct to choose pablum and bullshit. Alas, the Colonel casts his vote for the latter. He recalls when he was in The Green Machine heading for the Great Two-Way Rifle Range in S.E. Asia. Only one of the Colonel's fellow troops -- a lively friend from the Virgin Islands -- had what the Colonel considered to be an understanding of the politics of the war that went any distance below the surface. Col. Bunny's own understanding in those days of foreign policy wasn't sought after by Dean Rusk or the Journal of the American Sunbathing Society, one. But his dominant impression of many of his fellow troops was that they were mostly just pissed off about being taken away from their wives, girlfriends, and cars. Those are not empty concerns exactly but no other concerns were apparent either. Americans can summon up a fearsome anger when (really, really) provoked but we are still under the impression that the great oceans are a protection to us. Too, we think, Americans are probably fatally unable as a nation to deal with the subtleties of the threat posed by immigration and islamofascist subversion. And we will be hampered by the "rights fanatics" who will do their utmost to divert attention from the national interest and punish financially those whom they consider enemies. Witness the hysteria over profiling in the area of airplane security. We rest our case. Notes ^[1] "Power vacuum in West." By V.S. Naipaul, The Business Online, 10/16/05. ^[2] "Confessions of an Ex-Feminist". Fjordman, 4/11/05.