Alana Goodman and Ted Bromund both make great points about the Chinese “I’m rubber and you’re glue” human rights report and the leftist embrace of China. But just to enunciate the point in the context of President Obama’s willingness to cut the U.S. military. The international system as we know it is the result of generations of investment in the military. The United Nations is a side-show: Countries do not always embrace the UN’s lofty principles when they walk into the building on Turtle Bay, nor do they abandon their cynical interests and repressive philosophies just because they have signed a document. Strong militaries do more than ensure international stability; they also shape it. Simply put, might makes right.
If the United States abandons the credibility that having the strongest military in the world guarantees then we effectively enable Chinese diplomacy and the Chinese vision to become the predominant influence on international events. And what is that Chinese vision? A strong dose of racialism, a prioritization of stability over liberty, outright animosity toward a free press. In the human rights context, group rights would triumph over individual rights.
Many in the Western NGO and human rights community nurse a personal animosity toward American servicemen and servicewomen. The alienation has grown more severe since the end of the draft enabled many Ivory Tower elite to pass through life without having any meaningful contact with the military. Add to this deficiency a noxious moral equivalency that imagines all countries and all cultures as equal—the plague of multiculturalism—and the self-deception becomes malignant.
Forget the Chinese human rights report. The key issue is whether President Obama believes it is better for the United States to shape the world in its image, or to defer responsibility to another state or entity who will make values judgments quite different from what we and our Founding Fathers held dear.
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