Can the U.S. Survive the Seventeenth Century

IT’S A SHAME Francis Fukuyama never told Saddam Hussein that History had Ended: it is now clear that our victory in the cold war, far from signaling “Endism,” threw history into reverse. With all respect to President Bush, I would rewrite his United Nations speech to suggest that an old world is struggling to be reborn.

The founding generation of this republic was thoroughly accustomed to a ruthless international universe founded on raison d’état (the Massachusetts Puritans refused to ally themselves with Cromwell’s saintly Commonwealth despite theological cousinage), but most contemporary Americans have lived only in a Manichean world where the wicked-Nazis, Communists, and Japanese aggressors were overcome by the forces of the righteous Free World. Now, suddenly, we are supposed to rally behind an American-led coalition that would have sent even Cardinal Richelieu to prayer.