The U.S. and Its Allies Have Earned Their Bad Reputation

Major Western governments claim all the privileges of power and wealth while refusing to take responsibility when their schemes go up in flames.

Janan Ganesh comes up with a very convenient revisionist history of the last thirty years:

No, the west did not go on a triumphalist lap of honour after 1989. Far from imposing its values, it abstained from Rwanda, dithered over Bosnia and, in the last decade, took half-measures against Syria. In a curious choice for an overbearing empire, the US cashed a peace dividend so large that, as a share of national output, its defence budget has never again touched the levels of the mid-1980s. London and the south of France were still Russian playgrounds after the occupation of Crimea in 2014. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia was German policy until two Februaries ago. It is the west’s accommodation of rivals that stands out from that era, not its chauvinism.

I am reminded of the absurd arguments that we heard after 9/11 that tried to pretend that the U.S. had not been a hyper-interventionist power during the 1990s. According to interventionists in 2001, the U.S. had been on a “holiday from history”¹ that had been abruptly cancelled. George Will wrote, “After about a half-century of war and Cold War, Americans came to feel, understandably, that the world was too much with them, and they turned away from it.” It was insane to look at the record of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s and conclude that the U.S. had “turned away” from the world, but this was what lots of people that knew better said at the time.