My latest column:

A man beheads two Americans with a knife that is not particularly sharp. The second time, he taunts the president of the United States: “I’m back, Obama.” His terrorist organization, ISIS, is reclaiming Iraqi cities that were once liberated — painstakingly, block by block, house by house — by American soldiers and that cost American blood and treasure. Ebola is spreading in West Africa. Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson writes that we “are about to witness a human catastrophe that could destroy large portions of a continent and pose a global threat. And the response of the world, including the United States, is feeble, irresponsible and disrespectful of nature’s lethal perils.” An official from the National Institutes of Health characterizes the Ebola epidemic as “completely out of control.”
I had that in mind while reading a new report by the Pew Research Center. Nearly half of Americans think the United States is “less important as a world leader than it was a decade ago.” More Americans think the nation is doing too much (39 percent) to help solve the world’s problems than too little (31 percent), even though 65 percent of respondents say the world is more dangerous than it was several years ago, 67 percent say that ISIS is a “major threat” to the United States, and more than half say the rapid spread of infectious disease across countries is a major threat as well.
Have Americans forgotten that this is a great nation? And that great nations can shape events, and not merely observe them? More Americans think the country is doing too much to help the world than too little, even though a majority agrees that major threats to the United States exist and that the world is growing more dangerous. Switzerland should be allowed to hold those two views at the same time. The United States shouldn’t.

Read the whole thing here.

— Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.