After being sworn in for a fourth term, Vladimir Putin departed
the Kremlin for Annunciation Cathedral to receive the televised blessing of
Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The patriarch and his
priests in sacred vestments surrounded Putin, who, standing alone, made the
sign of the cross.
Meanwhile, sacred
vestments from the Sistine Chapel were being transported by the Vatican to New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to adorn half-clad models in a sexy show
billed as “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” One model
sported a papal tiara.
The show proved a
sensation in secular media.
In Minsk, Belarus, on
May 17, to celebrate International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and
Biphobia, Britain’s embassy raised the rainbow flag. Belarus’s Ministry of
Internal Affairs was not amused:
“Same-sex relationships
are a fake. And the essence of fake is always the same — the devaluation of
truth. The LGBT community and all this struggle for ‘their rights,’ and the day
of the community itself, are just a fake!”
Belarus is declaring moral
truth — to Great Britain.
What is going on? A
scholarly study sums it up: “The statistical trends in religion show two
separate Europes: the West is undergoing a process of secularization while the
post-socialist East, de-secularization.”
One Europe is turning
back to God; the other is turning its back on God.
And when Vladimir Putin
and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko are standing up for traditional values
against Western cultural elites, the East-West struggle has lost its moral
clarity.
And, so, what do we
Americans stand for now? What is our cause in the world today?
In World War II,
Americans had no doubt they were in the right against Nazism and a militaristic
Japan that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
In the Cold War, we
believed America was on God’s side against the evil ideology of
Marxism-Leninism, which declared the Communist state supreme and that there was
no such thing as God-given rights.
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With the moral clarity
of the Cold War gone, how do we rally Americans to fight on the other side of
the world in places most of them can’t find on a map?
A weekend article in The Washington
Post discusses the strategic difficulty of our even prevailing,
should we become involved in wars with both Iran and North Korea.
“You would expect the
U.S. and its allies to prevail but at a human and material cost that would be
almost incalculable, particularly in the case of the Korean example,” said Rand
researcher David Ochmanek,
Added John Hopkins
professor Mara Karlin, “If you want to ensure the Pentagon can actually plan
and prepare and resource for a potential conflict with China or Russia, then
getting into conflict with Iran or North Korea is the exact wrong thing to do.”
One wonders: How many of
these potential wars — with North Korea, Iran, Russia, China — could we fight
without having America bled and bankrupted. What conceivable benefit could we
derive from these wars, especially with a China or Russia, to justify the cost?
Looking back, only one
great power survived the last century as a world power. The German, Russian,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires did not survive World War I. World War II
brought to an end the British, French, Italian and Japanese empires.
The Soviet Union and the
United States were the only great surviving powers of World War II, and the
USSR itself collapsed between 1989 and 1991.
Then, in 1991, we
Americans started down the well-traveled road of empire, smashing Iraq to
rescue Kuwait. Heady with that martial triumph, we plunged into Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Though still embroiled,
we are now talking war with North Korea or Iran, or even Russia or China, the
former over its annexation of Crimea, the latter over its annexation of the
South China Sea.
Donald Trump is
president today because he told the people he would “Make America Great Again”
and put “America First.”
Which bring us back to the question: What is America’s
cause today?
Defeating Nazism and fascism was a cause. Defending the
West against Communism was a cause. But what cause now unites Americans?
It is certainly not Christianizing the world as it was in
centuries long ago, or imposing Western rule on mankind as it was in the age of
empires from the 17th to the 20th century.
Democracy crusading is
out of style as the free elections we have demanded have produced Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and
nationalists, populists and autocrats from Asia to the Middle East to Europe.
Perhaps our mission is to defend and protect what is
vital to us, to stay out of foreign wars where our critical interests are not
imperiled, and to reunite our divided and disputatious republic — if we are not
too far beyond that.