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Trying to play down the significance
of an ongoing WikiLeaks
dump of more than
250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom:
“The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s
in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust
us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets…. [S]ome governments
deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most
because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before,
the indispensable nation.”

Now, wisdom like that certainly
sounds sober; it’s definitely what passes for hardheaded geopolitical
realism in our nation’s capital; and it’s true, Gates is not
the first top American official to call
the U.S. “the
indispensable nation”; nor do I doubt that he and many other inside-the-Beltway
players are convinced of our global indispensability. The problem is
that the news has almost weekly been undermining his version of realism,
making it look ever more phantasmagorical. The ability... >>>