Karl Ziebarth
President of Ziebarth and Associates, Inc.

 The U.S. in the World Today

The Philadelphia Society
National Meeting
Sheraton Society Hill Hotel
April 1, 2006

We stand at a curious crossroads in history.  No nation has ever been less military, less imperial, less grasping, so foolishly generous, than the United States.  Yet we face the awesome challenge of, in fact, acting as an imperial hegemon, like it or not.  And, given the extraordinary fossilization of so much of the world’s social and political institutions (and which has build up colossal internal pressures), we are being forced to deal with regime change, with nation building, and all the agony which that leadership position forces upon us.  In our own self-defense. 

We don’t really want to be there.  Yet 9-11 taught us for once and for all (hollow phrase, we said that after Pearl Harbor) that we cannot retreat within Fortress America.  In the simplest terms, we are the target of every envy, every jealousy, every petty tin-horn thug, every evil fanatic in the world.  And they will take us down if we are not prepared to defend ourselves.  The ghastly toll of young lives cut down in Iraq is but the tiniest fraction of the horrors which await us if we do not develop a strategy to guide, control, channel the release of violent energy which has been built up in the Third World – and indeed in the Old World. 

We must not confuse policy with execution.  I am prepared to argue that Bush (our inadequate leader) did the right thing strategically to go into Afghanistan and Iraq.  He failed miserably to explain why he was sacrificing American lives, and possibly risking an economic collapse.  He, and those he chose to advise him, won the war and lost the peace.  They did not consider for one moment the painful lessons learned by the real imperialists, the Brits.  They might better have read and reflected upon the weary wisdom of my Lord Lugard, who was the complete imperial proconsul, given in his Dual Mandate.  Or learnt from Templar, who successfully conducted the first successful modern war on terror, in Malaysia, for an agonizing decade in the 1950’s (but with no TV cameras, or hateful reporters,  or radical propagandists carping).  Or even the experience of our own Indian-fighting army in the last half of the 19^th century.  Instead of tempered pressure, we used blunt force, injuring the very people we were trying to help.  No, they blundered in without a plan, and threw away what can only be reckoned a brilliant victory. 

As a nation, we must come to grips with a totally new dimension, which requires a different response, and we must separate political and economic changes from confused attempts to impose some of the views and values held by evangelical Christians on people of other faiths.  Live and let live – it took Europe 6 centuries of internal agony, from the 13^th century to the 19^th, to damp down the fires of religious hatred and ethnic particularism.  We have just seen the end (I hope) of the internal divisions in Ireland in the last few months.  Do we expect it to be so easy? 

Yet the effort, the task, is painfully clear:  Unless we can face up to the challenge, we will crumble as a society, the light of the shining city on the hill will be extinguished. 

There is probably no more thoughtful student of the present world-wide conflict in which we find ourselves than our speaker today, Max Boot.  Though his academic career was that of a historian, his practical experience has been that of a journalist and analyst of military affairs.    Recently he has returned to his origins with several well-received (if controversial) books on military history.  He is now the Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.  We look forward to his advice and perspectives.