U.S. 'Leadership' Isn't Necessary or Desirable

What Americans need are political leaders that listen to them rather than seeking to rally them for some new pointless conflict.

Robert Gates must be trying to win a trophy for the most absurd threat inflation:

The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own.

These are two of the silliest opening lines in a foreign policy article that I have ever read. Neither of these claims is true. Not only is the U.S. extraordinarily secure, but the threats that do exist are all manageable. If we look at them soberly, we will see that threats to U.S. security today are not significantly worse than they have been for the last thirty years, and they are considerably smaller than they were during the Cold War. The only way that you could reach Gates’ alarmist conclusion is to confuse other countries’ security with ours or to make things up out of thin air.