A Better World in the National Interest

In the final installment of his Davos journal, Jay Nordlinger quotes the somewhat coolly received Vice President Cheney:

Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity, and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanaticism. The days of looking the other way while despotic regimes trample human rights, rob their nations' wealth, and then excuse their failings by feeding their people a steady diet of anti-Western hatred are over. Nations fail their people if they compromise their values in the hope of achieving stability. Instead, we must seek a higher standard, one that will apply to our friends in the region no less than to our adversaries.

Perhaps it betrays the degree of neocon brainwashing to which I've been subjected, but this strikes me as entirely correct. We can't just sit on our hands within our own borders and allow despots to rise to power beyond them. Tyrants are infamously incapable of sating their hunger for power through mastication of their own people.

Of course, the degree to which this general truth can be stated confidently and pursued as policy owes much to the current state of the world. When another challenge that represents an overriding threat — as the Soviet Union did for so many years — survival will tend to trump principle.