Lost amid the campaign politicking is a number of growing crises, which to one degree or another, reflect the general global appraisal, that the United States has abdicated its traditional role—either on the grounds of fiscal erosion or self-doubt about America’s moral authority to pass judgement on aggressors.

In that void, China and Japan have been squaring off over a maritime territorial dispute, tensions are rising between South and North Korea, Lebanon is unwinding, Iran is at the point where it is daring the world to stop its proliferation, and, in the expectation of a post-American Afghanistan, regional powers are designing their own spheres of control. In all these cases, and more as well, there is a general sense that the U.S. will not come strongly to the side of an ally, and not come out strongly against the side of an enemy. In an analogous sense, we have now completed our version of 1977-1978, with updated Carteresque damnation of past policy, loud lectures on past American sins, estrangement with Europe and Israel, and self-righteousness that we have evolved beyond simplistic views of good and evil. All that is left now is the denouement of another 1979-80, when we once again reap what we have sown, as the world sizes us up and then concludes there will be few repercussions from from making regional “adjustments—in the manner of past 1979-80 wars by the Soviet Union, China, communists in central America, hostage taking and all the rest that once paralyzed a sanctimonious president.