First, let’s get something straight – the sky ain’t falling. No generation has a crystal ball. They all have to look whatever disaster comes their way square in the eye and decide how to handle it. This current ‘upheaval’ is no different. The one constant in the political world is change – usually messy, quiet change until it becomes a big, nasty problem.

My favorite cartoon as a kid was a seriously stupid one season wonder called The Drak Pack. It’s idiotic but fun. Anyway, in the title sequence the narrator tells us that “it’s right versus wrong, good over greed, niceness over naughtiness”. It’s the best summation of international relations I’ve ever heard.

Stop laughing – that narrator is right. International relations isn’t about getting along and singing ‘Kumbaya’ around the proverbial campfire – which would be better for all concerned. No, it’s about conflict. More conflict and some conflict to go with the conflict. Underlying all the conflict is the struggle for power. Okay, see y’all next… You want an explanation?

Okay, sure. This will come as a shock but not everyone loves freedom. At least, not everyone loves everyone else having freedom. Freedom gets in the way of important things like ruling the world and making the world safe for authoritarianism. Also, when people are free they get all pesky and start bad mouthing the people in power. that wouldn’t be so bad but then they want the people in power to lose power. If you’re a modern despot, you don’t want people getting the idea that they can just say whatever they like.

Revolutions start that way, doncha know.

Why can’t nation-states just get along? Because they have different ideals, values, needs, desires and circumstances. Like all of politics, it’s just people stuff on steroids. Everyone just getting along is a whole lot easier if there is only one way to do things or to think or to act. Problem is, those pesky citizens don’t wanna all be good little robots. Some nation-states, like the US, thrive on the constant chaos that comes with freedom. Others, like Russia, can’t stand the whole democracy thing.

It’s not as simple as authoritarianism versus freedom. It’s more basic at its root but it branches out in a million ways and produces leaves and fruit beyond counting. International relations are complex even just at the governmental level but politics almost never plays a one level game. Layers and layers of levels all representing different people with different goals and needs.

Little wonder the USA almost always prefers to just go home and let the rest of the world sort itself out.

There was a time when we could do that. Mostly. But that was over one hundred years ago. World War I finished off the security of just ignoring the problem until it went away, with a LOT of help from the US Civil War. Modern warfare got its grisly start in the battlefields of the War Between the States. World War I industrialized it. Warfare was never to be the same and never to be safe to ignore ever again.

What World War I industrialized, World War II perfected. Wholesale slaughter on an unspeakable scale. World War I is mostly figurative in name as not all the world was involved. World War II was very literally global in scale. No corner on Earth was completely unscathed. What nations didn’t suffer directly from the battles all suffered indirectly from the fallout that persists to this day.

We can debate whether or not Japan would have surrendered without the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the point is moot. The nuclear age stripped away America’s imperviousness. We’re still next to impossible to invade but we are very easy to strike with intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Heck, Japan managed to hit mainland targets with bombs strapped to weather balloons. We are the toughest nation on Earth but we are far from invulnerable.

No, I’m not suggesting we should all build bunkers and fund more missile defense. My point is that even if we do take out ball and go home, it’s perfectly possible to follow us. The world is one massively complex, interrelated web of humanity. The worst mistake you can make is the assumption that we understand it – or that anyone does. The second is to assume that if we don’t bother them, they won’t bother us.

Brace yourselves for another shock. The US has enemies. Some because we did stupid stuff. some because we got greedy and did bad stuff. Some because we did things that were wrong. Most because we simply are who we are. Our mistakes and misdeeds of the past need to be acknowledged and made right where we can but they also form a smokescreen for our enemies to hide behind. Those misdeeds give excuse for the hatred toward us because we not only value freedom, we make the crazy thing work.

Our enemies are very real. Some have the capacity to do us real harm; most do not. However, there are two ways to eat an elephant: one bite at a time and by inviting the whole neighborhood. We’re the elephant and they have plenty of neighbors.

Try eating an elephant that is looking at you. Getting that fork in is gonna be hard; what happens next will be worse. Ticking off the United States did not work out well for Afghanistan. Every other nation state noticed. None want to be the guy in front. But more than a few are willing to stab a fork in our collective backside.

See, we’ve been at this clean up job since 1945. We figured if we could get all the nations to trade and at least talk, if not get along, that most would come around. We did that with persuasion and a lot of money. But it beat having to fight another world war, even a conventional one, by a country mile.

It was easier when we had a big enemy like the Soviet Union. Folks back home could understand why we had to stay in the game. But once the Soviet Union collapsed and everyone seemed to be (mostly) getting along, it became harder to explain why we needed the world’s most ridiculously oversized military. Being too big to mess with doesn’t seem as necessary when you have a couple oceans that pretty well prevent the angry neighbors from coming over.

Until we found out the hard way that they didn’t need to invade.

But that was twenty years ago. State sponsored terrorism is a thing of the past, right?

Mostly, but only because we’re still forward facing. Afghanistan proved that America did have a breaking point and would show up and bust heads if it she was pushed too far. Sponsoring terrorism became a bad idea so that tool went back in the toolbox. it still exists but not on the same scale.

That will change if we turn our backs. And not just on the militant front. America can be hurt in a variety of ways. None are sufficient to destroy us alone (at least none not involving nukes) but even as independent as we are, we can still need other nations. Trade won’t make or break us, but losing it would REALLY hurt. Lots and lots of ways nations can act against American interest. The complexity of the system hides thousands of vulnerabilities.

It’s in our selfish self interest to stay in the game where we can keep an eye on all the other players.

To my mind, that’s not the most important reason for the US to remain a power in international affairs. The better reason is that we truly do have friends. if we take our ball and go home, what happens to them? Europe can fend for itself, probably. But we have a LOT of allies that can’t. Allies that need our support. Allies that trusted us despite our crazy penchant for changing leadership like other nation-states change socks.

Only scumbags betray their friends. The United States of America is not perfect but we aren’t scumbags, either. We believe in freedom, but we also believe in truth and justice. We believe all men really were created equal. We believe that it is better to be a nation of laws, not men. That all are equal before the law, equally entitled to a fair hearing and justice. We believe that to keep our rights and freedoms we have to carefully balance power so that no one person or group becomes too powerful and take away those rights.

We believe in a Creator that didn’t just create us but all men. All mankind is a brotherhood. The masculine sounding language is old fashioned, but still every bit as true as when Jefferson penned in the Declaration of Independence that:

Yeah, we believe all that high flaluting stuff. Oh, we make fun of it a old and out of date, but we never really stopped believing. Those high ideals that we have too often failed matter. Those ideals make enemies for us but they also make us one of the most reliable of friends. If we lose that, if we lose that willingness to try to live up to those ideals, we are truly lost. Betraying a world full of friends, even the weird and the crazy ones, would destroy the very heart of what it is to be American.

That’s reason enough to stay and let others play with our ball.

It really is niceness versus naughtiness. This close to Christmas let’s stay on the nice list.

Catch y’all later – seems Drak Pack is available online…